


Present Imperfect

by Guede



Series: The Time Travel Grammar Book [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Hale Family, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst and Humor, BAMF Lydia Martin, BAMF Stiles, Baby Werewolves, Background Character Death, Birthday Cake, Brother-Sister Relationships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Irony, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Moral Ambiguity, Multi, Pack Bonding, Pack Dynamics, Pack Politics, Peter Feels, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Single Parents, Slow Build, Talia Hale Feels, Werewolf Culture, Young Chris Argent, Young Hales, Young Peter Hale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-06-10 08:54:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 44,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6949492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Talia and Peter attempt to regroup after their parents’ death, but doing that and sharing a house with Chris Argent and time-traveling Stiles, Scott and Lydia isn’t easy.  And Gerard Argent isn’t going away, and they still have an unknown monster lurking in the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Mom, Cora burped on me again,” Laura whines.

Talia digs in her purse for a tissue. When she turns up nothing but an empty plastic sleeve, she bites down on a groan and then turns around to Peter, who’s irritably batting Derek’s hands away from his tie. He looks up, catches her eye, and shakes his head. “I used up my pack wiping up that mess Derek made in the car.”

“Godda—Laura, I know, just wait till I find something, would you?” Talia says. She twists around and Scott is holding out a pack of tissues and thank God for that, even if she still isn’t sure about him. She grabs it, rips it open, and then takes Cora into her lap and starts wiping off her two daughters. “How much longer do we have to sit here?”

Lydia sighs. “The funeral director already was fussing when I told him we weren’t sending out invitations or publishing any notices. The least we can do is have the usual two-hour session.”

“This funeral home’s been here since before I was born,” Peter mutters. “I’m sure he’s run into our uncles and aunts before, does he really want them all packed into his establishment and having hierarchy fi—Derek, for the last—you know what? You can have my tie if you’re so interested.”

He yanks at the knot, then pulls the loosened loop over his head and then tosses it at Derek, who looks at the strip with wide eyes, then hesitantly puts it to the side of his chair. Peter sees that, huffs and then slouches out in his seat, glowering at the two caskets in front of them.

“It’s only a toy when it’s on me, is it?” Peter says.

“So many ways to go with that,” Stiles snickers. He’s facing them, sitting on the steps up to the casket platform and fiddling with his phone. “And no, Lydia, I recognize that it’s a solemn occasion and I won’t go with any of them and what the hell is he doing here?”

Talia looks up, sees Stiles’ head already up and staring at the doorway in the back, and then turns just as Chris stumbles backwards, snarling and just barely short of a shift. Scott gets to his feet and reaches his hand out towards Chris, then waves his other hand back at Talia and Peter.

“It’s Deaton,” he says.

“Who?” Chris snaps. He’s been edgy the whole time they’ve been here—rightfully so, since he’s only here because none of them wanted to leave him alone at the house.

“Shut up,” Peter says.

Chris twists around, then just pulls himself back from doing something stupidly aggressive. By then Scott’s gotten himself out of the row of chairs and has taken Chris by the arm, and is pulling him a safe distance from the rest of them. Peter smirks at Chris, but it’s almost pure reflex; Talia can tell by how her brother’s already angling his body towards her.

“Stay with the kids,” Talia says, handing Cora to him. She catches the flicker of irritation in Peter’s eyes, but barely has time to get up onto her feet before Deaton comes into the room.

“Here to pay your respects?” Stiles says. He hasn’t gotten up but he’s put his phone away, and Talia notes with no little irritation herself that Deaton seems to look far warier of Stiles than of her.

No, when Deaton turns to her, it’s with a face like someone who’s interrupting a party to deliver bad news, not like someone who should already know he _is_ the bad news. “I’m sorry to be coming to you here,” he says.

“Then why are you here?” Talia says. She pushes out from between the row of chairs, snagging Derek back by his shirt as he tries to climb over the top of his chair. “I thought I told you that if I wanted you, I’d call you.”

“I know, and I’m sorry to be going against your request, but it just didn’t seem likely that you’d be making that call any time soon,” Deaton says. He’s being very polite, from his tone down to the way that he’s slightly lowering his head to be shorter than her, but it’s the same kind of polite her father used to use, talking to Talia because she was an alpha too but having no intention of asking for her opinion. “And there are things you should know.”

Talia senses more than smells Peter’s ire rising, but it’s a flicker of movement from another direction that catches her eye. She glances over and finds Chris stiff-arming Scott, his eyes fixed with disturbing intent on Deaton.

“Well?” Talia says, turning back, when Deaton doesn’t go on.

Deaton blinks. “It’s—here?”

“Why not?” Talia says.

“Tradition—but that is up to the alpha,” Deaton says, sounding very much as if he’s reassuring himself. He takes a deep breath and straightens his shoulders, and then tries to lower his voice anyway. “You may not want a druid, but there are services we offer—”

“If this is about needing a druid, well, I didn’t have one when I was living with—when I was away from my parents’ home, and I don’t see that the one here did much good for my parents,” Talia says, before deliberately looking at her parents’ coffins. “And you’ll excuse me if I don’t have a great deal of time for whoever sent you.”

“Look, maybe we should do this some other time,” Scott says. “Alan—”

Talia twists around and looks at Scott, and then twists a little further to catch Lydia grimacing and Stiles rubbing his hand over his face. She stares at them, then just—just shakes her head. “Figures. Well, whatever he’s done for you three before, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is what he could possibly do when he’s—”

“If I were bothering to go along with anybody else’s plan, I would have left the day you told me you didn’t want a druid,” Deaton suddenly breaks in. “I’m not here because I’m trying to secure a place with your pack, Talia. I’m here because—”

“Because you’re a stranger who just feels like helping out?” Peter snorts. He’s half-turned in his chair, his shoulder to its back as he absently plays one-handed pattycake with Cora. “We barely buy that with the time trio here, and they’ve at least killed people for us.”

“Well, they’re going to have to kill a lot more if you don’t look out,” Deaton says. “Gerard Argent’s been in contact with some of the other hunter families.”

Talia goes cold. She hasn’t been involved in the politics of their world since she left—wasn’t as involved as she wished she had been, even beforehand—but even the most ignorant werewolf knows that they all live on the edge of a massacre. They’re just fortunate that the traditional hunter families seem to be just as territorial and arrogant as any alpha, and don’t like working together, because hunters outnumber them. It takes time to bring in a new werewolf, even a bitten one; it only takes handing someone the right bullets to make a hunter.

“So what?” Chris says sharply. He twitches when Talia looks at him, his head going down, but his eyes are still fixed on Deaton and they’re burning with barely-suppressed rage. “So he’s talked to them. So did that do any good? Are they coming? Because that’d be a damn surprise—”

“Mommy, he said—” Laura says, though her voice is very hushed compared to normal. And when Peter growls under her breath, she shuts up and just cuddles up to Derek as the two of them peep over the chair back.

“—been over a month and his son’s a werewolf, and he can’t take care of it,” Chris finishes.

“He…he hasn’t been able to rally any support from the other families,” Deaton admits. He’s reluctant and at first Talia dismisses it, assuming it’s just disappointment from losing the element of manipulation, but the worry in Deaton’s scent is rising, and he’s still looking at Chris, not Talia. “But that’s the point I’m trying to make. I _was_ packing up to go, but then I got word that he’s coming down here in person since he can’t get help from the others.”

Chris’ eyes widen sharply, then start to glow. The flesh of his face and neck ripple with a shift—and then Scott yanks on Chris’ arm, hard enough to make him stumble back behind the other man. When Chris snaps at him, Scott’s eyes flare red and Scott snarls forcefully enough that the children whimper and Talia has to work to keep her claws in.

“Oh. Well, that saves us the trouble of going to get him,” Stiles says. “I was wondering how we were going to fit that in with the burial, and getting the Hales’ place open again, and Peter’s finals, and…I’m missing something.”

“Plan for when the rest of the Hales hear about the deaths and decide to come down and test the new alpha,” Lydia says. Of all things, she appears to be touching up her mascara.

Deaton pricks alert. “I thought since you were having a funeral, they—the rest of your family still doesn’t know?”

“And I’ll bury you next to my parents if you tell them,” Talia snaps. She’s half-distracted because she can’t quite decide whether she wants to rip him up or rip into the infuriating people whose help she’s been forced to take.

“I won’t,” Deaton says. “I don’t think this town needs a dominance challenge any more than you do.”

“Well, then what _do_ you think it needs?” Lydia asks. When Scott starts to say something to her, something clearly along the lines of a plea, she simply puts up the back of her hand towards him.

It’s a very, very small, if briefly enjoyable, consolation to Talia that Deaton seems no more comfortable with the woman than Talia is. “Druids are still respected by hunters,” he says, his eyes drifting slowly to Talia. “I was going to offer to—to intervene with Gerard.”

“He’s not going to respect you one bit,” Chris snorts.

“And he’ll only ask for his son back, which I’m not going to agree to,” Talia says. She watches the curiosity spark in Deaton’s face. And then the frustration as he realizes she’s not going to explain herself.

Deaton struggles a few seconds, then puts his hand out. “Look. We don’t know each other, but I became a druid because I wanted to help people. You and your family, but also the rest of this town, and there’s more going on here than just your family’s troubles. I want to make sure things don’t get out of hand, or else we’ll all have bigger problems.”

“Way to be cryptic,” Stiles sighs. “So, if this is about the Nemeton, and the whole ‘beacon’ of Beacon Hills thing, I’m on it.”

At least part of his concern must be that because the flesh around Deaton’s eyes and mouth scrunches minutely, while his scent is shot through with surprise. He’s good at keeping his composure for his age, but he’s not carrying the maskers he was using before and so he can’t hide everything. “You might be for now, but even Merlin would be hard-put to handle it all if we have Gerard Argent and the rest of the Hale family at the same time,” Deaton says after a moment. “And then there’s what’s already going on out in the preserve.”

Talia hears Peter hiss and lifts her hand to signal to him, then puts it down. “Then tell my family that Gerard’s coming hunting,” she says to Deaton. “Tell them that, and tell them I don’t know. That’s about the only thing you could do to help.”

Deaton looks surprised again, but he recovers and shake his head. “You can’t be serious. When they start coming—”

“They’re not going to come,” Peter mutters. “Not after what the last reunion was like. They’ll just sit and wait.”

“And even if they do, I’m probably still going to know before you, but I suppose you can try and call me first,” Talia says. She takes a step back towards her family, then looks at Deaton again. “But if you are going to tell someone about it, it’d better be me. You’re not my druid, and you don’t have obligations to me, but that doesn’t mean I _won’t_ remember who really cared about my family and who cared about other people. Now go, and stay away from us.”

Deaton doesn’t like it, but he seems to have exhausted his determination for the moment. He also has the grace to not look at anybody for a second opinion before he leaves.

“My father’s probably already betting that you and I are talking,” Chris says, barely waiting for Deaton to get out of earshot. “Anyway, he’s not going to check that close before he starts cutting up werewolves.”

“Well, I don’t think we were planning to check either,” Peter says. He shoots Chris another taunting smile, then turns more soberly to Talia. “We—”

“Why did you tell him that?” Talia demands of Lydia. “For that matter, I don’t care if we’re living in your damned house and you’re suffering from some kind of—of guilt trip over us, you don’t get to just use my family as pawns.”

Scott lets Chris go and starts to come over, and Stiles gets up as well, the pair of them looking alarmed and wary, respectively, but Lydia just remains where she is. She’s finished her damn make-up but she still looks far too unruffled for Talia’s taste.

“I wasn’t telling him, I was reminding him. He knew there’d been an alpha change before we even did, remember? And I was reminding him because he needs something to distract him and worrying about the rest of your family’s as good a thing as any,” Lydia says. “I don’t know how savvy he is now, but he wasn’t that good at figuring out which enemy was higher-priority when he was older.”

“Lydia,” Scott says sharply. Then he looks at Stiles, who shrugs. He presses his lips together, possibly the angriest Talia’s ever seen him, before shaking his head. “This is why we have such a hard time getting people to trust us, you know that?”

“Besides the whole, hey, we’re in your life because we’re trying to correct our past fuck-ups?” Stiles says. “Look, Talia, we can sit you down and point out every single person in town who we used to know—”

“Don’t be stupid. That’s not why I’m upset and you’re smart enough to know it,” Talia snaps. “I don’t need to know everything you know, but I need to know that you aren’t deliberately withholding things just so you can get things the way you want them. Which might not be how _we_ want them.”

Lydia’s been looking from speaker to speaker, expression still dismissive, but her posture’s slowly gone more and more rigid. Now she suddenly uncrosses her legs and gets up, and twists so she and Talia are directly facing each other. 

“Fine. Here’s the bottom line,” she says. “You’re facing at least three possible battlefronts and you have three pre-teen children, your brother the teenage beta, and the bitten, revenge-driven son of a psychotic hunter. We’re an alpha werewolf, a banshee, and a mage who have nothing better to do but get ourselves killed on your behalf. So are you taking that offer or not?”

Talia sucks in her breath. What she wants to do…what she wants to do is slap the woman for her arrogance, because nobody says that kind of thing unless they’re sure of the outcome. And slap her for her truth, because Lydia is, if anything, underplaying it, and that grates on every instinct Talia has. She’s—she’s the _Hale_ alpha now, even if nobody outside of this room and the damned druids know it. She’s the latest alpha in a long line of dominant pack leaders and Hale alphas do not take help. 

“Yes,” Talia says bitterly. _Because_ she’s the alpha, and she needs to think about the good of her pack, and if that takes shattering every tradition her family has, she’ll do it. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll put up with your bul—your nonsense.”

“Well, I agree, we should prearrange things more,” Lydia says. Then, while Talia’s still surprised at the concession, she turns and glares at Scott. “Otherwise a surprise comes up and we’re just making up things on the spot.”

Scott looks back at her with enough irritation that Lydia seems surprised at it. “You said to stop talking to him, so I wasn’t keeping an eye on him.”

“Those aren’t logically related,” Lydia says.

He looks at her again, then exhales sharply. He turns away, pauses, and then goes ahead and shoulders past Chris, heading for the door. “I’m going to see if the director’s around,” he says. “It’s time, isn’t it?”

Lydia frowns at his back, then looks at Stiles, who seems equally irritated with her, though he doesn’t look as if he’ll be leaving any time soon. “It is time, and anyway, if Gerard’s coming, I want to go around and reinforce the early-warning alarms,” he says. “I think we’re all just pissing each other off standing around here.”

“Mommy,” Laura whispers uncertainly. “He said…”

Talia presses her lips together, then sighs and bends to pick up her daughter. Stiles is right—that’s the perpetually frustrating part of these people, no matter how they present it, they always end up being right. “Can we _please_ stop using that kind of language around my children? They’re learning enough bad habits as it is.”

“Also, Cora needs a change,” Peter says, jerking her off his lap. He holds her a good two inches off his lap, wrinkling his nose, as the smell of urine begins to waft from her.

“The diaper’s not going to leak, Peter,” Talia mutters. But when he glares at her, she just…she’s tired now. Tired, and they still have to actually bury their parents tonight. “Fine. Fine. Just—one of us should go and see where these alarms are. I want to start seeing everything that you’re doing to this town.”

Stiles blinks, then shrugs. “Well, sure, ride-alongs are fun. So…by one of us…”

“She means me,” Peter says, and then he looks at Talia.

Speaking of manipulative, Talia thinks, but she can’t help a little smile at how eager Peter is, and how hard he’s trying to hide it. She might be wary of his passion for magic, but it is good to see him interested in something besides irritating people.

“Yes, Peter,” she says, hefting Laura. “And in the meantime, you and I can discuss how to deal with them when they get here.”

“Fine by me,” Lydia says, pulling out a tube of lipstick. “About time _someone_ started planning properly.”

* * *

For all the drama at the funeral home, it’s actually not till the next day that anybody has time to do anything. When they get back to the house, Derek’s thrown up again—Stiles _told_ Scott to stop feeding him ice cream, no matter how whiny he got about his clothes—and Cora’s crying for no apparent reason, so Talia ropes an obviously disgusted Peter into helping her with the kids. Which is almost a better show than little chubby Derek in a kiddie suit. 

Or would be, except that Stiles sits down to do a quick email check and ends up spending two hours negotiating with magic suppliers over delivery methods. Because this is before the Darknet really took off, and people figured out there’s a ton of money to be made in shadier versions of Fedex and UPS, and so finding a supplier who knows how to ship stuff via the postal service without getting caught for violating hazardous-materials laws or having the stuff arrive in unusable condition is kind of hard. And then everybody’s got to go out to the preserve for the burials.

Stiles has been to his fair share of werewolf funerals at this point, but Talia really seems to be on a streak of not bothering, because she tosses barely a handful of wolfsbane flowers over her parents, and then just stands with her head bowed for about a minute. Then she grabs up the nearest shovel and unceremoniously starts to fill in the grave. It gets her a couple looks from Peter, but he doesn’t seem that surprised, and after that he silently pitches in. They don’t bring the kids out either; whatever Talia says, she definitely appreciates Scott’s babysitting skills.

She does mark up a tree near the grave with a spiral, but it’s small and the marks are shallow, and given the week’s forecast of plenty of rain, moss should grow over it fast. 

“It’s a mark, it’s just a way of spreading the word. Whether or not people see it, we still have a vendetta on against whoever killed them,” Peter says, frowning at Stiles. “I thought you knew werewolves.”

“Yeah, but there are little cultural differences. And also, the werewolves I’ve spent the most time with tend to be outliers. And straight-up liars, so I like to cross-reference.” Stiles pops a fry into his mouth, reaches for the next one, and then looks down into the container. There are still fries left, but they’re a lot further down than they should be. “I’m only letting you get away with that because we’ve been kind of assholes.”

Peter scoffs, while munching down on both the burger Stiles brought him and at least two of Stiles’ fries. “One fast-food meal, a book here and there, and picking me up from school is a pathetic bribe,” he mumbles. “Also, I think you owe me just for all the looks you got. Tomorrow everybody’s going to want to know how some shady-looking guy with a bunch of flowerpots in his car freaked out our principal so bad he actually tripped running back into the building.”

“Tell them I was delivering flowers from his wife’s divorce lawyer,” Stiles says.

Peter snorts, then makes a couple strangled noises. He has to lower the burger to keep from choking, and then he swigs from his soda. Then goes right back to scarfing down the food. He doesn’t snack, or look like he wants snacks, outside of regular mealtime, but if you put something in front of him, he’ll down it like a starving orp—Stiles suppresses a grimace, then takes another look at Peter. Sure, he’s lanky, despite the shorter height, but he had the energy to manhandle a sleepy, whiny Derek to the table for breakfast this morning and that is harder than it looks. Kid Derek is just a smaller size bag of concrete.

“So what is this a bribe for?” Peter says, swallowing the last of his burger. “Let me guess, you’ve thought about it and you just remembered this time we went out to check alarms together, and I screwed it up, so maybe I shouldn’t do this with you?”

“Are we allowed to make those kinds of jokes yet?” Stiles says.

Peter looks at him with narrowed, suspicious eyes. The effect’s a little negated by the fact that Peter’s mouth and a little of his chin are all smeared with burger grease, which is glistening in the sun coming into the back of the SUV. “So…we’re still doing this?”

“Yeah. Unless you thought about it and decided you’d rather go home and try and eavesdrop on Lydia and Scott and your sister sitting down and brainstorming the best way to kill Gerard Argent and fend off our family,” Stiles says. And has a nice, long snicker at the genuinely, ridiculously wistful, torn expression Peter has. “In all seriousness, you’re probably better off just weaseling the details out of Talia later. That’s not a discussion even I really want to be in.”

He grabs the paper bag from the fast-food place as he talks, stuffing their trash into it. Then he puts that aside and works through the flowerpots till he can get to the back door and pop that open. They’re parked on the outskirts of town, beside a local road that runs parallel to the interstate, and he can hear the cars speeding on the highway but he can’t see them and they can’t see him. Perfect spot to put an extra alarm.

“Why not?” Peter says, watching Stiles pick and choose pots to pull out. “You don’t seem like the squeamish type.”

“I’m not, but Gerard Argent is just…at this point, for us, he’s really an extended exercise in masochism,” Stiles says. He gets his top three pots out, and then climbs back into the car for the stuff he’ll need to turn innocuous wildflowers into magical beacons. “I mean, I don’t know if I can explain this in terms you’ll get, but you just keep killing a guy, in a zillion different ways, and at first it’s—nice, in an admittedly disturbing way, that if you don’t think he suffered enough last time, you get a do-over. And then it’s just, really, can the guy never find something better to do than piss you off?”

Peter listens attentively. He’s been twisting the same napkin around the same finger for the last twenty seconds, he’s been listening so closely. But then he shakes his head. “No, I don’t get that. If he hurt you—and he did, right? That’s why you go after him?”

Stiles stops on the bumper, his bag in hand. “Yeah,” he says after a second.

He gets off and starts to lay out his things on the ground near the pots. Peter scoots over to sit with his legs over the bumper and watch. “I’m guessing he hurt me—that me—and my family, too.”

“He fucks with pretty much anybody who gets in his way. We’ve had—this is what you do when you’re a drunk time-traveler, you start shooting the shit about what else people might be like, and we’ve had really long debates about just what would have to change in Gerard’s life to make him a better person,” Stiles says. The edge of his awl is a little dull, so he gets out the sharpening rod and gives it a couple strops. “Even Scott gave up, and that says something.”

“He’s still putting up with Gerard’s son in his room,” Peter observes. He’s kicking his feet a little, though he stops a second before Stiles looks up at him. “Did you know Chris Argent before?”

Stiles swallows down his first-choice comment, which involves an offer to go through the phone book—since those are still a going concern here—because after the burial he and Scott and Lydia had gotten together and agreed that they needed to cool it with the antagonistic cynicism. Not that Stiles is all that sure they’ll manage it. He knows he goes through cycles where, even though he still honestly wants to help people, he can’t bring himself to put out the effort to actually take a timeline for what it is. That just involves too much caring.

Though usually he and Lydia aren’t having that issue at the same time, he thinks, and now Scott’s having problems—which aren’t for the same reason, but for practical purposes they’re close enough. “Yeah, we did,” Stiles says. “Scott knew him the best, if you’re wondering about that.”

Peter hums. His feet are kicking again. “I take it he wasn’t as bad as his father?”

“Well, it depended, but he can change a lot more, let’s put it that way,” Stiles says. He tests the edge of his awl again, pricks the end of his finger, and then sets the tool aside and sucks his finger till the bleeding stops.

“Did he ever kill his father before?” Peter asks. When Stiles looks up, Peter shifts back as if expecting to get reprimanded, and then lifts up his chin. “I’m just wondering. My sister’s made her call, but I don’t know that I buy him being able to carry through a vendetta. Besides, if his alpha shows up—”

“I am guessing that his alpha is dead, for him to get here,” Stiles says.

Peter hisses his breath a little. He’s surprised more than anything, and then he’s annoyed with himself. And then he looks sharply at Stiles. “What?”

“What?” Stiles repeats.

“What do you—why are you looking at me like that?” Peter says. “Like you think I should be doing something else?”

Stiles resists the urge to roll his eyes. Or to reveal that actually, surprise here is good. Because they are trying to be nicer, and sometimes there is such a thing as too much information. “Because I am human, and I’ve been through a lot, and stuff gets blurry.”

“Well, fine, but is it ever going to stop getting blurry?” Peter snaps. “Don’t you ever just—just try to live where you’re at?”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, which shuts Peter up. He reaches for a flowerpot, then pulls back his hands and squats and looks up at Peter. “Yeah. We have. And—it makes it too hard. We know we don’t belong, you know, and then—like I said, we’re not perfect, and we don’t always manage to stop people from dying, and that’s—that’s bad enough when you’re confusing them with other people, let alone caring about them for them.”

They stare at each other for a little bit. Peter is uncomfortable, both with it and with what Stiles has said, and he bites his lip and shifts in place, but is making himself meet Stiles’ gaze anyway. So whatever, Stiles is older, he isn’t worried about impressing anyone, so he looks down. Pulls the flowerpot over and works out the plant, and then starts to work on bespelling it.

“So when do you stop?” Peter asks, in a surprisingly quiet voice. “You can’t do this forever.”

At one point, Stiles would’ve said, just watch. At another, Stiles would’ve said, well, that’s when we’ll find out where to stop. “I guess when we think we’ve actually done a good job,” he says. “It’s harder than it looks.”

“Time travel?” Peter says.

“No, that’s pretty easy once you figure out the way magic shifts across time,” Stiles says. Then he holds up the plant. “So, are you going to sit there and pretend you understand what I’m doing, or do you want to get down here and actually learn it?”

Peter makes a face at him, but those kicky feet are already pointing their toes down towards the ground. “I know what you’re doing,” he says, as he’s hopping down.

“Sure you do,” Stiles says. “Sure.”


	2. Chapter 2

Halfway through the discussion about how many hunters they can realistically get nailed on arms-trafficking charges, Scott excuses himself and goes upstairs. He pauses as he passes the door to the Hales’ bedroom, but all three kids’ heartbeats are slow with sleep, so he keeps going till he’s in his room and digging into his backpack.

It takes him a worryingly long time to find it, but just as he’s starting to panic, his fingers close around the necklace. He pulls it out and fingers the silver charm on it, the engraving so worn at this point that it’s barely visible, and then he sticks it back into his bag.

Scott’s riffling around in the closet, trying to figure out where he stowed their extra sleeping bag, when somebody starts up the staircase. He tunes in and identifies Talia’s and Lydia’s voices in the kitchen, and then meets Chris at the bedroom door with the sleeping bag in hand. “Did you want something?”

“I wasn’t sneaking up to attack the kids,” Chris says defensively. Since Talia allowed him to stay, he’s kept a wide berth of the children—and that’s made things a bit easier, and the look on his face says he’s as defensive about ditching that as he is about still being treated as a potential danger. “Lydia told me to go up and see what was keeping you.”

“Nothing, just getting ready for tonight,” Scott says, nodding to the sleeping bag. “Figured I’d get it while I was thinking about it.”

He moves the bag and Chris jerks backwards, even though he’s already well clear of Scott. Then Scott tries holding the bag up, but Chris just stares at him till Scott finally sighs and pushes the bag into Chris’ arms.

“I thought—I thought we were on patrol,” Chris says. He doesn’t drop the bag, but he holds it as if he intends to drop it the first chance he gets. “My father’s coming. That’s not a boy scout camp-out event.”

“We don’t both have to be awake the whole night, not with the alarm system Stiles is setting up,” Scott says. He waits for Chris to go ahead of him, then follows the other man down the stairs. “And if we don’t have to, it’s better to be well-rested. And we’ve got a spare sleeping bag, so why not use it?”

Chris grunts, still sounding skeptical, but he shifts the sleeping bag so that he’s got it securely tucked under his arm. It’s been a few days and werewolves usually bulk up quickly once they’ve got enough food and a safe place to stay, but he still looks pretty rough: bone-thin, with a restless, jumpy air that makes Scott keep checking whether he’s got his claws out. In all honesty, Scott doesn’t really think that Chris should be going out, but both Chris and Talia have insisted that he take shifts, so Scott is just trying to limit the damage.

He would’ve really argued hard against it, once upon a time. Trying to do the best for people. Sometimes Scott thinks it’d be easier if, along with learning when to pick his battles, he’d also learn when to stop feeling like he needs to pick a battle.

“You know Gerard really has to die, don’t you?” Chris says suddenly, turning around. They’re standing in the hall, still a couple yards from the kitchen. Talia can hear them, and Lydia might even be able to, depending on how much she’s concentrating, but Chris doesn’t seem to care. “It’s not just my vendetta. He’ll—”

“Keep going till somebody stops him, and you have to make sure of that, or else the next time he comes, it’ll just be worse,” Scott says. “Yeah. I know.”

Chris is silent for a few seconds. “I haven’t really asked. I—you have enough weird tech, and with the world my family moves in, I’d be a hypocrite if I said it was impossible. But when you say you’ve had run-ins with Gerard before…”

He trails off and Scott’s a little hard-pressed to figure out why, since he checks and he’s not standing aggressively, and Talia’s still in the kitchen. And anyway, Chris doesn’t look intimidated, not with his chin up and his eyes glittering in the semi-dark of the hall. He’s reluctant for some reason besides thinking Scott might get offended by whatever he wants to ask.

“What about it?” Scott finally says.

“How’d you deal with him?” Chris says. His voice both drops low and sharpens, so it’s like the whisper of a knife cutting through the air. “You killed him before, right?”

Scott blinks hard. “I—”

“You said you wanted to help people,” Chris snaps. Then he jerks his head to the side, grimacing, probably at the way his voice rose near the end. He glances towards the kitchen, shoulders hunched, and then looks back at Scott. “In the woods, when—you knew I was in that tree. You were talking about how you people would help anybody, even hunters. Well, if you want to help the most people—”

“Nobody’s arguing about whether we’re going to stop your father,” Scott says, a little exasperated. He’s just been through this argument so many times, and he knows how it always ends, and fine, so he still doesn’t feel comfortable about killing anybody, even people who deserve it, but does that really matter? Does he have to get excited about it, so long as he helps? “And I said I’d help protect people who needed it.”

Chris looks as if he wants to say something unpleasant, but he pulls himself back. His head actually moves back, like it takes that much effort—this Chris is a lot more demonstrative than most of the Chrises that Scott has known, has a lot less of a poker face.

And not just bitter, but he’s bitter in a very vicious, immediate way that Scott associates more with…the fresh-from-the-hospital Peters, and sometimes Stiles when Stiles is having a very bad spell. His head twists again as he finally spits out a reply. “Well, protect people here by telling me how to take out my father. That’ll do a lot more than any of the fancy tech you’ve brought back with you.”

“I think we have to get through all the hunters first,” Scott says.

Chris just stops himself from rolling his eyes. “That’s easy.”

“It’s not. Look, just—sheer numbers, all right, and take it from somebody who’s screwed up a lot by just charging in by himself, making your back-ups get hurt rescuing you is a terrible strategy,” Scott says. He’s starting to sound a little harsh and he makes himself take a breath before he goes on. “Besides, that _is_ part of getting to your father. He’s good at getting people to stand between him and you, so first you have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“The people he’s got are the hunters who are too dumb or too hungry to care that he shot my mother in front of them,” Chris says. “All the traditionalists, the people who really stick to our code, they would’ve left.”

Scott can’t help a sigh. “Well, then, there are an awful lot of idiots and people who like cash, aren’t there?”

Then he walks back into the kitchen before he can get too upset, only to have Talia brush by him. She pauses in the hall and Scott turns around to see Chris warily moving to be by the wall, and then sliding along that till the man’s in the living room. Talia watches him in silence, only her head moving as she tracks Chris, and then she goes on up the stairs. She’s got Cora’s food in hand, so Scott figures it must be meal time.

Chris doesn’t come back out of the living room. Scott isn’t sure what the man is doing, but there’s nothing sensitive in that room at the moment, so he leaves the man be. Lydia’s still at the kitchen table, but she’s tidying up, so Scott goes to the fridge. Stiles and Peter should be home soon anyway; it’s probably a good time to start dinner. And cooking usually makes Scott feel better.

“He doesn’t sound like he intends to live much past the grand confrontation,” Lydia says.

Scott chops down on the leeks too hard. He doesn’t amputate any fingers, but the ends go flying off the board and hard enough to knock the sink tap on. He puts the knife down and turns the water off, and then takes up the knife again. “Stiles is going to be home soon.”

“I wasn’t introducing a punchline, Scott. I was being serious.” Lydia sets her laptop on top of a neat stack of files and maps, and then comes over to stand by the sink. She watches Scott dispatch the rest of the leeks, then unbags some carrots and swings the faucet around so that she can run them under the water. “He really doesn’t want to survive this. And as much of a relief as it is to not have to deal with Kate for once—”

“If he doesn’t want help, you can’t make him take it. Isn’t that what you and Stiles keep telling me?” Scott mutters.

She looks at him for a bit, just holding the carrots under the water. He moves onto onions and she finally takes the carrots out. Lydia sets them at the edge of the sink and walks around opening drawers till Scott pauses and nods at a box on the counter, so Lydia can find the peeler.

“Do you want us to move him somewhere else?” Lydia says.

Scott looks up at her. “What? Where would—wouldn’t Talia object?”

“She might, but she might also appreciate having one less person she distrusts near her family,” Lydia says. She strops the peeler across half of one carrot, then wrinkles her face as a peeling comes dangerously close to flipping into her blouse. When it instead falls to the edge of the sink, she uses the tip of the peeler to nudge it into the sink. “Scott, please don’t make me deal with both you and Stiles going off at the same time. I did that once and never again. Not even if we find a timeline where I’m the creative head of Prada.”

The worrying thing is, she doesn’t even remotely look like she’s joking. Scott starts to ask if she’s feeling okay and her brows twitch up and that makes him feel a little better. But just a little.

“I’ll work it out of my system,” Scott says, turning back to his chopping. He pauses to let his tear ducts heal from the onion sting. “Look, I will. And don’t—don’t freeze Chris or anything like that, just so Allison can get born, all right? Because it’s not even that.”

“Really,” Lydia says.

“Yeah, really,” Scott echoes, except a lot sharper. Sharp enough that Lydia stops peeling, and then leans over to look more closely at his face. He almost asks her to get out of it, but instead sighs and puts down the knife, and turns to look at her. “Really. Allison and I—you know, three timelines ago? The one where she married Jackson?”

Lydia does a terrible job of hiding her disgust, and Scott half-heartedly tries to hide his amusement, because the fact that she’s even trying says something. She and Stiles are always going to be closer, but…he thinks he and she have worked out a few things, too. “That one? Honestly?”

“She was nice. Well, Allison’s always nice, but…anyway, when we said goodbye, it—I meant it. It’s just—I really got the time for once, and…and it’s been long enough. I think it’s sticking,” Scott says slowly. He stares at the onion, then sweeps it into the bowl and reaches for the pack of ground pork.

“Well, good. I realize personal chronology’s tricky at this point, but even we’ve moved out of our teen years,” Lydia says.

Scott rolls his eyes. “Think Stiles going on and on about Peter’s ‘adorability’ made me realize that.”

“Do _not_ bring that up. God. I don’t even know what to do with that.” Lydia slides the peeler down the carrot a last time, then drops the carrot on the edge of the cutting board. Then she looks at him again. “So that’s not it.”

“So I don’t think I want to have this talk when Stiles and Peter might be back any second, and…” Scott lifts his head “…Chris might be coming over, he’ll cross the privacy wards if he goes another yard. I promise I won’t let it mess me up, okay?”

“If you even know what it is,” Lydia mutters. “You and Stiles, neither of you ever want to _use_ the fact that we’re living in each other’s…well, fine, but I’m holding you to that.”

She wipes her hands off on a dishtowel, then slaps the towel down on the counter and walks away. Lydia’s heading into the hall and Scott can hear Chris, who’d been hovering on the edge of the living room doorway, hastily back up into the room. Chris stays in there till Lydia’s gone across to the front door and then outside, and then a few minutes longer.

Then he comes into the kitchen. He takes in what Scott’s doing, then comes up to the sink, using very slow, telegraphed movements. Hesitates there, watching Scott, before picking up the peeler and the rest of the carrots.

“What do you want?” he says, more calmly than before. “I gave Talia my word I’d protect her family.”

“I don’t w—” Scott stops himself and looks at the meat he’s just dumped into a bowl. “Just do me a favor, don’t go after your dad the first time you see him. He’s always got at least one trick up his sleeve.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” Chris says, but he’s just annoyed, not accusing. He works through a carrot and a half, then tosses the finished carrot onto the cutting board. “You ever do him yourself?”

“Yeah,” Scott says. He can tell Chris is surprised and a little nervous by how fast he answered that. His hand floats over the handle to the cabinet with the spices, then pulls back. He’ll just chop the carrots first, less chance of poisoning everybody with meatloaf that’s got sugar where salt should be. “You say that, but he’ll make you so mad you forget, and that’s what he’s counting on. So calm down, okay? Think. He won’t think you can do that.”

Chris sucks in his breath a little, as if he’s going to take offense, and then he lets out a short, humorless laugh. He fiddles with the last carrot, then drops the peeler in the sink and pops a claw and just uses that instead; he’s not so used to them that he’s that great about it, but he’s not taking off so much Scott feels like calling him on it.

“You do know him,” Chris says.

“I know all of you,” Scott sighs. “All of you.”

* * *

“And then Lydia told Scott Derek destroys enough stuff already, so why he’d want to get Derek started ten years early on cars is…” Laura frowns, concentrating, her lower lip pushing out “…is…past her?”

“Beyond,” Peter corrects absently, while wiping some food dribble off Cora’s cheek. Feeding young children is a little disgusting, and no, being a werewolf shouldn’t make him used to that sort of thing; when he catches game, he takes it home and cleans it and cooks it like a civilized person. But it’s also surprisingly easy to turn into reflex once you get the pattern down: spoon, tip, hold, tip, remove and wipe. “Well, your recall’s good for someone who can’t remember where her socks are after she takes them off, but I don’t know that we’ve really learned anything today.”

Laura doesn’t quite follow all of that, but she understands enough to stick her tongue out at him, and then hide behind Talia, who’s trying to brush Derek’s hair. “Don’t listen to your uncle, Laura, you were a very good girl today,” Talia says.

Derek tilts his head up and then scrunches his face as Talia accidentally slides the brush off his hair and onto his forehead. “Laura stole my pudding,” he says as Talia yelps and pulls the brush back and then rubs at his brow. “And then she ate it. I was watching, Mommy.”

“But Derek ate all the marshmallows in the cereal!” Laura protests. “And Scott gave him another pudding.”

“Laura, do not take your brother’s food. Derek, you know every time you eat that much sugar, you run around too much and end up hurting yourself,” Talia scolds. Both children wilt a little, Laura from where she’s peering over Talia’s shoulder, and Talia gives Peter a weary look. “I may end up being the first alpha to challenge somebody over overfeeding children.”

Peter snorts and then yelps himself as Cora makes an ominous hiccupping sound. He hastily puts the jar and spoon down and flicks up the rag, ready for anything that might come out of her, but after a couple hitches, she settles back in his lap with a slightly cross-eyed look.

“Well, if he’s not doing what we tell him to do when he’s watching them, he deserves it,” Peter mutters. He keeps the rag up for a little longer, having learned the hard way that Cora’s a little bit of a submarine—right down to how she spouts mashed food into your face—before cautiously picking up the jar again. “But so nothing got done?”

“No, things got done. We’ve got an alarm system and patrol shifts,” Talia mutters. “And Lydia’s gotten far enough in with the local police that we can scan for some of the license plates registered to known Argent hunters. Though I don’t think that’s working as well as she’d like.”

“Why not?” Peter says, looking up.

“From what I can get out of her, she’s only been able to find about half the hunters they’ve run into before, in other timelines, and not all of _them_ are hunters here,” Talia says. She finally finishes Derek’s hair and nudges him out of her lap, only to stifle a wince as Laura immediately plops herself in his place. “Pigtails?”

Laura looks very indignant. “Those are ugly, Mom, are you kidding?”

Talia visibly is trying not roll her eyes. “You liked them last w—fine, what do you want, then?”

“Uh-oh,” Derek says.

He’s come over to peer down at Cora. Peter yanks the jar of food away, missing whatever Laura tells Talia, and gets the rag around and Cora tipped into it just in time to keep himself from being decorated with toddler burpage. Moisture seeps through the rag and Peter tries his best to not groan.

“Come on, it washes off,” Talia says, amused.

“Says the person who managed to pack most of her clothes, and isn’t living in whatever Stiles grabs when he’s shopping for more herbs,” Peter says. He shifts around so that he can pat Cora’s back, then pauses and looks up at Talia. When she nods, he gives Cora a few more pats and then lowers the girl back to his lap, where she promptly reaches out and starts mussing up Derek’s hair. “So today, I learned how he does those plant beacons. And if I could get to my books on geomancy, I might be able to figure out how to take them over when they go.”

Talia looks interested, wary, proud, and frustrated all at once. It’s a lot going on, and it’s a couple seconds before her face finally settles on frustrated. “Peter, we talked about this. We can’t—”

“—go back to the house till we get some of these hunters cleared out of town, I know. And I’m not bringing it up again, I’m just saying, if I had my books,” Peter says. Cora’s crawled mostly onto one of his knees, so he unfolds his other leg and then hisses as its cramped muscles complain. “Besides, even when this is all over, I don’t know that I want to go back there.”

“You don’t?” Talia says.

Peter looks up. He’s surprised and hurt. “I thought—weren’t you talking about transferring me out?”

“Yes, and—I still want to do that, but when I said that—Peter. Peter, stop it, I’m not Mom and Dad,” Talia says sharply. The children all freeze and she hesitates, then sighs and reaches out to touch Peter’s knee. “You’re staying with us. It’s just…well, I wasn’t thinking when I said that. And when I say _that_ , I mean that I hadn’t actually asked you.”

“If you’re asking now, I’m fine with leaving,” Peter says. He watches Talia sag in relief and then smile as she goes back to brushing out Laura’s hair. “Why would you think I want to stay?”

“Well, I know Mom and Dad were unbearable, but you’ve always been really interested in this place. Looking up magic on your own, learning about the currents here,” Talia says, blinking rapidly. “And sometimes you’re so territorial you might as well be an alpha.”

Peter’s surprised again, but…in a good way, he guesses. He knows his sister has a handle on him, but sometimes he forgets just how good of one, even when she’s been away. “We’re not giving up the land just because we move one school district over. We’d still be near enough to the preserve—we might even still be able to live in it, you know. It just depends on where we pick.”

Talia nods, but she’s a little reserved, concentrating too hard on the…apparently, Laura wants a French braid. “I don’t know if we can stay that close,” she mutters.

“Why not?” Peter says. “I don’t want to live in _that house_ again, but it’s not like Mom and Dad ruined the whole town. And—and anyway, they’re not here anymore.”

It still feels—it feels nervy to say that. Not just odd, and the way the words stick on Peter’s tongue isn’t only wrong. It’s that he still hunches in, expecting his father to stalk around the corner any second, or his mother to sniff him out and fix one of her cold stares on him. And that’s annoying. Peter sat up half the night with their bodies, and then went to the stupid funeral they have to have for stupid regular-human records, so they won’t have problems inheriting the property rights, and then he shoveled in at least a third of the dirt onto their bodies.

He’s fine with them being gone, he thinks irritably. He had his moment, but he just…he forgot for a little bit what they’d been like alive. And now they’re not, and he and Talia can finally move on, and he’s been looking forward to that. He doesn’t want to let his parents ruin that, not now. He really doesn’t.

Talia’s watching him, but she’s quiet, like she’s reading his thoughts on his face. Peter shifts uncomfortably, debating whether to say something or get up or something else, and his eyes drift to the smooth strokes of the brush through Laura’s hair, and then he hears the steady thump of his sister’s heartbeat. And maybe that’s some alpha trick she won’t tell him about, making him listen to that till he calms down, but…well, it works.

“There’s still the rest of the family,” Talia finally says. “Which makes it tricky, if you think about it. If we stay in the area, we can’t keep them from finding out for much longer, and I can think of at least two of them who might want to challenge me.”

“If it’s the same two I’m thinking of, I think you can take them. Easily,” Peter says. “And I’ve seen them more recently than you, I bet.”

She smiles at him and he feels a little warm, strangely enough. But then Talia’s smile slips away and her brow furrows at more than just the kink she’s made in Laura’s braid. “If it was one on one, and I didn’t have to worry about keeping you and the kids safe. Werewolves don’t fight fair, Peter, no matter what anybody says. When I was away—”

Peter perks up but Talia’s eyes drop to the kids. Laura actually seems to be ignoring the conversation, singing a little song to herself as she plays with her stuffed rabbit, but Derek’s no longer playing with Cora and he ducks away when they look at him.

“Anyway. The problem is, if we go far off, even just temporarily, they’ll say I abandoned the pack and they’ll take over, and if we ever want to come back, we’ll have to fight tooth and nail for it,” Talia says. She sighs, staring at Laura’s hair, and then undoes the braid with a frustrated noise. “And we’d have to go _very_ far off. Maybe even east of the Mississippi.”

“But then we’d have to deal with other packs, too,” Peter points. “Besides, I’ll be eighteen in a few more weeks. And Stiles and Scott and Lydia, they only really seem to care about _us_ out of our family. Stiles was setting up a few of the outer beacons to pick up other werewolves.”

Derek suddenly straightens up. “Can he tell if Dad’s coming back?”

Talia goes stiff and her scent spikes with a cocktail of negative emotions—anger, fear, bitterness—so violently that Peter almost sneezes. But he doesn’t miss how Derek’s already bracing himself, or how Laura and Cora suddenly are curling tight in on themselves, too. And the three of them all are missing any hint of surprise, as if this is a reaction they’ve had before.

It’s obvious at this point that Talia didn’t simply throw Mark out, but Peter just hasn’t gotten a chance with Talia alone to really ask about it. He’s not so stupid that he’s going to ask that sort of thing around the others, especially as he’s starting to decipher the work Stiles has done on the house and has picked up that the man’s done things with hearing runes. But the only times that he and Talia seem to find away from Stiles, Scott and Lydia are the times that they’re with the children. And any mention of Mark seems to put the kids on the verge of crying fits.

“Why would you ask that, Derek?” Talia says, in an abrupt, flat tone. She’s trying not to sound intimidating, Peter thinks, but she’s only managing to sound as if she’s inhuman.

Derek edges a little backwards, till he’s bumping up against Peter’s arm. He freezes and Peter—a sudden, out of nowhere urge to do something for the boy surges up, making Peter freeze as well. And then Derek puts his arms behind himself and grabs Peter’s arm and Peter purrs before he’s even completely finished unfreezing.

Talia’s eyes start to flick up to him but drop again when Derek makes a soft noise. “Just—we saw him,” the boy says.

Peter sighs around his purr, which he can’t quite stop. Well, he could, if he wanted to really fight his instincts, but he’s not really feeling up to the effort right now. “That was Chris, Derek.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Derek insists. “He doesn’t look like Dad at all, and we saw Dad.”

Which admittedly is true, and something that had been niggling at Peter. Unless the man had changed a lot, or Peter’s memory was faulty, Mark had been around Chris’ height but noticeably broader in the shoulders, and he’d had hazel eyes like Talia. And had been more of a strawberry blond.

“Dad’s not here anymore,” Talia says tightly. “I told you, Derek, you aren’t going to see him anymore.”

“I know, but he’s here. Mom, I did see him. I did. And Laura saw him too,” Derek says. He’s starting to sound a little shaky. “You did.”

“He was at the window again,” Laura reluctantly whispers.

“Again?” Peter says, over Talia’s frustrated repetition that he’s gone. “When?”

Talia gives him a warning look, but Peter ignores that. Derek twists around and wraps himself around Peter’s arm, pulling at Peter’s sleeve so that Peter’s shoulder is almost popping out his shirt-collar. “When you and Mom were out taking care of Grandma and Grandpa,” Derek whispers. “Scott was changing Cora’s diaper, and Laura and I looked up and Dad’s face was in the window.”

“Did you tell Scott?” Talia says.

Derek looks surprised that she’s asking him, but he shakes his head. “He stood up and Dad went away, and you said not to talk to anybody about Dad after the last time.”

“Because you shouldn’t,” Talia says, clearly on reflex. Then she frowns and she looks between her frightened children, and Peter can see her shifting to guilt. “Derek, Dad’s gone and he’ll stay gone. I won’t let him come back, all right? But—but if you see him again, you can talk to me about it, all right?”

“Or me,” Peter says.

Talia looks at him, but doesn’t say anything. Derek nods, and then snuggles his head into Peter’s arm, apparently satisfied. A second later, Cora makes a sleepy noise, and Laura lifts her head and complains that Talia hasn’t done the braid.

Peter worms his leg away from Cora, and his arm from Derek, who looks at him with such a forlorn expression that Peter almost feels obligated to go back. But then the flailing of Basil Stag Hare’s ear catches Derek’s eye and he turns away, and Peter ducks into the bathroom to brush his teeth and do all the things he needs to do before bed. Neither he nor Talia are on the night’s patrols, and he has to admit, now that he’s just looking at himself in the mirror, that he could use a full night’s sleep. He doesn’t think he’s had one since the last time he saw his parents alive.

“We’ll talk about it,” Talia mutters when they’re all in bed, and the kids are mostly dozed off. “I just—not with the kids.”

“Well, when is that going to happen?” Peter mutters back. Though honestly, much as he wants to know…he’s interested in keeping his sister happy too. Well, in keeping Talia not so stressed that she’s going around near-shifting all the time. He does actually believe her when she says they’ll stay together now. It wouldn’t sting so much when he thinks she’s changing her mind about that if he didn’t. 

“When the hunters are down, we’ll have a little more room to breathe,” Talia says after a second. “Can you just wait, just a little? I’ll tell you before you turn eighteen, I promise.”

“Some birthday gift,” Peter says. Then he turns and he looks at his sister over the three small bodies huddled between them. “Okay.”

Talia smiles at him, the relief overwhelming her attempt at humor. “You know a secret is your favorite kind of present.”

“You know what’d be a nice present this year,” Peter says into the pillow. “If Derek doesn’t eat my cake.”

His sister chuckles, and then he feels her hand brush the hair back from his forehead. He smiles, though he turns his head into the pillow to hide it, and closes his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize that I've subscribed to the whole werewolves happily eat game raw thing too (in other fics), but I see no reason why it has to be like that. If Peter prefers to take his food home and cook it, then Peter doesn't care about living up to people's stereotypes.
> 
> So Peter's a senior in high school and it's the fall semester, if anyone's keeping track.


	3. Chapter 3

Step one in dealing with Gerard Argent: cut off his resources. They might have to deal with horrifically slow Internet and a world which hasn’t yet seen the merits of digitizing, but Stiles isn’t a complete otaku. People were coordinating covert operations before they even had telephones, so he thinks he and Lydia can manage a little finessing of the established law-enforcement apparatus.

It helps that Gerard is very, very bad at hiding. Chris at least always seemed to understand that they needed to not look like a criminal enterprise, but Gerard apparently takes _The Godfather_ as his inspiration, this one included. Still, it’d take a little bit too long to get them all arrested as an arms-running cartel, so Stiles and Lydia opt for more direct measures.

Okay, so basically, they put out hits on hunters. They have the money, and thankfully, a fair number of black-market contacts seem to have carried over to this timeline. Anyway, a couple shootings when hunters leave Beacon Hills to resupply and whatever, and the word starts to spread quick that somebody’s got it in for Argent followers.

“But how is this not going to swing the other hunter families to Gerard’s side?” Deaton frowns.

And Stiles is talking to Deaton. With Chris in tow, because having sat down and considered all available resources, they can’t afford to _not_ use Deaton. That said, it’s Stiles and not Scott talking to him because they also can’t afford for Deaton to mess around with whatever druid agenda this time, and Deaton might be willing to help but that doesn’t mean he actually will.

Also, given how _disturbingly_ naïve he is, he might just not be capable. Intellectually, Stiles knows everybody has to start from somewhere, but he assumes that druids, well, train people before sending them out. Have exams, practicals, something. “Because they’re already all iffy on Gerard because he’s breaking the whole matriarchal inheritance rule, right?”

“They are assuming that your mother is dead,” Deaton says, glancing nervously at Chris. When Chris just thins his lips, Deaton straightens up a little. “But as for the rest of the family, yes, it’s unclear about what’s happened. A few have heard something about Chris and a werewolf attack, but they’re split on whether the werewolf Gerard’s hunting down now is Chris or is the werewolf who killed him. No one seems willing to take Gerard’s version at face value.”

“Well, that’s where you come in,” Stiles says. “You, and this handy invention called a videocamera, and Chris’ acting skills.”

Deaton looks between them, and then hitches a little as Chris makes an irritated, half-growling noise. “If you want to talk to somebody, you can tell everybody what my father really did,” Chris snaps. “We’ll tape me saying it and you can take it around. I’ll say the hunter deaths, those were in retaliation for what he did. They’ll be happy to have an explanation for those and not have to wonder if gangs have gotten involved again.”

“I understand that, but how does that help us?” Deaton says. “If they see for sure that Chris is a werewolf, won’t that make them more likely to want to help Gerard?”

“But they aren’t going to see that Chris is a werewolf,” Stiles says. “They’re gonna see Chris walking over a mountain ash line, and if he can do that, he can’t be a werewolf, can he? He’s just a guy whose father’s gone completely round the bend, and needs to be isolated and put down immediately for the good of the community.”

“All right. All right, I can see how that would work the way you want it to,” Deaton says slowly. “Except how are we going to show that?”

Stiles sighs. Clearly, they can’t count much on Deaton’s improvisation skills. “Well, you’re going to stand over there, and hold the camera, and I’m going to empty out this bag of ash, and Chris will do his thing, and then we’ll hand you a nice little spiel for the traveling roadshow and just do what I say, would you?”

Thankfully, Deaton does. He tapes, Stiles draws a line of grey dust around Chris, and Chris steps back and forth over it, doing his grim-faced hopscotch thing. Then Chris turns to the camera and explains in very curt terms that his mother rescued him from a hunt gone wrong, only to be shot by his father as soon as they’d gotten home. “Without even checking if she’d been bitten,” Chris says bitterly. “And she wasn’t. She and Kate. He just shot them and took over, and he’s been angling for that for years, but she wouldn’t let him. He just didn’t want to wait anymore.”

Chris is very convincing. Deaton is very concerned, and when they’re done taping, he comes over and asks if Chris needs anything else, to which Chris just stares till Deaton backs off. Stiles pops the DVD into his laptop just to check that Chris didn’t flash eye-glow or have any other suspicious tells, and when he’s sure they’re good, he hands the DVD to Deaton and then sends the man on his way.

Then he turns around and Chris already has one sleeve rolled up. “There any reason you didn’t want to give him the whole story?” Chris says.

Stiles sticks the man with the syringe and watches as Chris doesn’t even glance away from him. “I know hunters have stuff besides that outdated heart rate bullshit, but the key to beating a lie detector still isn’t truth, it’s belief. Anyway, this is his first run as a red herring, let’s not give him too much to screw up.”

Chris takes his arm away and starts to roll down his sleeve, then hisses and grabs his arm over the healing syringe mark. “So what was that stuff, anyway? It looks and smells like real mountain ash.”

“Trade secret,” Stiles says.

“Fine. Then what was the stuff you just gave me to keep me from shifting?” Chris says.

“Worried I’m gonna slip it into your breakfast cereal?” Stiles snorts. “I wouldn’t. It’s just an antipsychotic cut with a little wolfsbane to speed things up. Anybody who knows werewolves and common mental-illness drugs could come up with it.”

Chris frowns and keeps holding his arm, standing by as Stiles finishes packing things into the back of the car. Then he comes around to the passenger’s side and gets into shotgun; his arm looks fine now, though he’s grimacing and tilting his head every so often as if his balance is off. “I think I remember hearing about that. But doesn’t it end up just doing the opposite after a while, and make people shift when they _don’t_ want to? You build up a tolerance quick, right?”

“Yeah, well, that’s why you don’t need to worry about getting it with your cornflakes. We don’t need that issue in the house with the kids.” Stiles pulls the car out of the vet clinic’s parking lot and into the road, and then turns left. 

“Why do you have that stuff around?” Chris says after a second.

“Because I’m a werewolf therapist on the side,” Stiles says.

The antidote’s already kicking in, judging from how Chris’ eyes flash. He’s got good baseline control for someone who’s only a month in, but Stiles is pretty sure that Chris is pulling a Derek and anchoring with anger or vengeance or something like that. 

Stiles starts to make a mental note to talk to Scott about it, because long-suffering idealism aside, Scott’s sort of a maladjusted werewolf-whisperer, and then he remembers that that _Scott’s_ resurfaced issues are why he’s carrying around a dose of the shift-suppressor anyway. He knows his friend and eventually Scott’s going to have to sleep, and then the nightmares are going to come back.

And what Lydia expects Stiles to do about it, he’d really like to know, catching a glimpse of her red hair near the back entrance to the supermarket. Stiles pulls the car into the lot and maneuvers it so that the back end is right up to her and the bags heaped up in the arms of the werewolf standing next to her. He puts it in park and pops the back door, and then gets out. “Yeah, I saw your text, and I don’t—”

“Just take Peter and get this all back to the house,” Lydia snaps. “I need to run down the sheriff. When I’m back, we’ll talk.”

Then she walks off across the lot, towards where her car is parked. Peter watches her, then side-steps a little as Chris cautiously comes around the other side of Stiles’ car. “She’s been like that since she picked me up,” he says, starting to move his armful into the car. “All she’d say was that Scott has a pathological inability to avoid rescue missions, and if I ask you what that means, are you going to tell me a really long story about the difference between Bentham and Stuart Mill?”

“What happened?” Chris says bluntly. “Who’d he run into? One of my father’s?” 

Stiles looks at the remaining bags on the ground, then bends down and pokes into one. He pulls up a container of ice cream, which is suspiciously wet at the bottom, and puts it down, only to see two more in the bag. He sighs and wipes his hand off on the bag, and then grabs that and another two, and puts them in the car. “If we are all dead-set on turning Derek into the first diabetic puppy-boy ever, can we at least do it with unmelted treats?”

Chris stops and stares at him, jaw working. Peter’s closer to Stiles than to Chris, and as Stiles looks up and meets Chris’ stare, Peter edges a little closer. Then slightly to the side, and when Chris finally snorts and turns away, grabbing half the bags in one go—way to not show the werewolf strength—Stiles looks over and catches Peter looking slightly flushed. And annoyed, his eyes flicking away from Stiles, then going back, as he pretends he totally hadn’t first gone to duck behind Stiles, rather than flank out.

“People at school are so confused now,” Peter says. He grabs one more bag and puts it in, and then follows Stiles before abruptly quickstepping it around the front end of the car. He just beats Chris to shotgun; the body of the car keeps Stiles from seeing Chris’ expression, but he can see Peter from shoulders up and Peter stiffens, hunches, and then defiantly tosses his head as he scrambles ungracefully into the seat.

The back passenger door opens and shut. Stiles gets in and glances back, but Chris is just slouching in the seat, looking out his window and apparently ignoring them. “What, because Lydia got you today? You’re getting free chauffeur service either way, why don’t you just sit back and bask in the luxury?” Stiles says.

“What, with him and the popsicles?” Peter scoffs, hooking his head back. His eyes flick over too, checking, and when Chris doesn’t react, Peter looks both relieved and disappointed. Then he realizes that his coat’s still rucked around from his hurry into the seat, flashing a sliver of bare side and he flushes again and yanks at it while Stiles pulls out of the lot. “They all thought you were Talia’s new boyfriend, but seeing Lydia is messing that up.”

Stiles has to stop anyway to let another car pass, so he has a good, long, disbelieving snort. “Seriously? I’ve actually hit the age of majority and I’m still being cast as the boytoy?”

“What?” Peter says, frowning. “Boytoy for who?”

“An embarrassing list of people who you’ll never meet,” Stiles says, grinning at Peter. He can’t help a laugh as Peter narrows his eyes and then huffs, clearly trying to sound like he doesn’t care, but just coming off like the petulant kid he is. “So, anyway, since we are carpooling today, how about we try to find things we all have in common?”

Peter’s still pissed about having his curiosity thwarted. “Like what? Like that we’re all not interested in Derek throwing up on the carpet again?”

“Like the monster in the woods,” Stiles says. “We haven’t had a chance to compare notes, what with the respective family drama and the constant threat of hunters and all, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten.”

Silence in the car. Through two intersections, one with a ridiculously slow wait for left turns, and then Chris finally stirs. “You saw it?” he says.

“Shouldn’t we wait till we’re back at the house?” Peter says. “My sister’s going to want to hear. Especially since actually, you keep saying none of the alarms you put on the house are going off.”

“Just because stuff at the house isn’t going off doesn’t mean it has any relevance to whether or not something’s in the woods,” Stiles says. “It’s a pretty big house, but that’s still just like…point zero zero three percent of the preserve’s total acreage. Also, I said compare notes.”

“So you haven’t seen it,” Chris says.

Peter’s visibly changed since the mention: when the word ‘monster’ rolled out of Stiles’ mouth, he’d snapped his head up and looked straight out the windshield, eyes wide, before taking a quick look to the side, and he’s still jumpy. Not restless, like he usually is, but straight-up jumpy, pulling his hands in towards himself and up his sleeves so he can hide how he’s picking at his claws, his head moving every so often as he takes another glance out the window.

“What, afraid you’re going to lose your leverage?” he mutters, looking at his hands. “My sister already promised.”

“More like, Talia said the deal was with her, and these three have their own arrangement going on. Unless you count as pack representative,” Chris says. He sounds more amused than annoyed, though he’s growling a little under his breath. “It was definitely semi-incorpor—”

“Why wouldn’t I count?” Peter snaps, twisting around.

“Okay, please no fighting in the car, I hate having to tase somebody in one, all those flailing limbs,” Stiles says. He puts his hand up and grabs Peter by the hair as Peter’s head swings near him, and then uses that to push Peter back into his seat.

Then gets a little tangled, but Peter’s still mid-startled-to-irritated noise when Stiles flicks his fingers free. Peter keeps his hair a little bit longer as a teen than he did as an adult, and doesn’t seem to use as much product either. Lot silkier without the gunk, Stiles absently notes.

“But he—” Peter starts, obviously trying to sear the side of Stiles’ face with his eyes. He pauses, collects himself to slump back in his seat, and redirects the frying gaze to the dash. “I don’t know what you’re talking about anyway, semi-incorporeal. It went through a wall.”

“It has to have at least some corporeality if it can interact with physical objects, and I’m not sure what you were doing with it inside, but when it came out, I saw it moving a couple shutters,” Chris says. He’s breathing a little fast, though that smooths out in a few seconds. “And Jesus, kid, calm down. I just meant I have no idea about your pack. Your sister doesn’t seem to be doing anything the way she’s supposed to be.”

“Okay,” Stiles says, raising his voice over Peter’s snarl. “One, Chris, let’s not be patronizing when you’re in the dependent position. Two, let’s not be patronizing when your knowledge is based on spying on and torturing werewolves over the generations. Three, Peter, let’s not make me get the car re-upholstered, especially if you want your friends to know your mom’s boytoy is fine.”

Peter stops in the middle of pulling his claws away from the leather, his eyes widening, and then he jerks as Chris lets out a startled laugh. “He doesn’t mean—he’s making a _joke_ , Argent. Something you might be familiar with, seeing as you’re a walking example of one.”

In theory, pitting two antagonistic, competitive personalities against each other should result in a mutually self-reinforcing delivery of information. In practice, Stiles actually is glad to see the house come into view. “Do you two really want to throw down? I mean, really? Is that a great use of your time when you both have going after other people on the agenda? It’s not like you both don’t know where the other one of you’s going to be.”

“Besides, I think your eyes are the wrong color for me to be bothering with,” Chris drawls.

Peter goes still and stares straight ahead as they pull up onto the driveway. Then he jerks open the door. The car hasn’t quite stopped yet, but he gets out and then stalks around to the back and yanks up the door. Stiles can hear him curse softly as a few of the bags promptly fall out. Plastic rustles but nothing plops on the concrete, and then Peter goes stalking by Stiles’ side, his backpack and some of the groceries in hand.

“Do they train you to turn werewolves into killers?” Stiles says, watching Peter go into the house. “I mean, honestly, I’ve always wanted to know because you have this elaborate Code but then every time you pop up, you’re just pushing and shoving till werewolves _gotta_ show themselves and you know what they call that when actual, legit cops do it? Entrapment. Like, illegal. Like, making a problem when there isn’t one.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do, challenge him to make him feel better?” Chris snaps. “If you want to talk about the right battles, then that’s a great idea, maul the Hale alpha’s little brother.”

Stiles has about a zillion replies to that, and he starts to load up for a couple. Then stops himself, and just pulls the keys from the ignition and gets out, and works on pulling out the groceries. He’s older, he tells himself. Older, wiser, and so far beyond experienced at this point that he doesn’t know why he and Scott and Lydia still have to _work_ at this. All the stupid time-travel literature out there talks about how much easier that makes getting things done, once you’re armed with a little foreknowledge. But they leave out the stuff about how people are still aggravating as hell.

“Look, why _aren’t_ you calling a big meeting on this?” Chris asks. He’s turned sideways in his seat to look at Stiles. Then he gets up, hesitates, and slowly maneuvers himself so that he can squat down at the other side of the interior, nudging bags forward as Stiles removes them. “What don’t you want Talia to know?”

“It’s not that we don’t want her to know. I think it’s nice and clear that she doesn’t like that approach,” Stiles mutters. And then looks up, catching Chris as they’re reduced to only a single line of bags between them. “But let’s just say, I have a feeling that people might be influenced by the presence of other people when they talk about what happened to them. So I like to ask the same question in multiple settings. And you?”

Chris tenses and a little glow leaks into his eyes, and Stiles thinks that the man’s just going to pull one of his strong, silent routines. But this one is a little more desperate than the versions that Stiles is used to, that and maybe a little more risk-taking.

“I know going after my father’s an uphill battle,” he says abruptly. “I’m not stupid, I know I’d have a hard time against other werewolves right now, and he’s worse than any alpha. So I want to know how you’ve done it.”

Stiles blinks hard. “Just…what, war stories?”

“As long as you don’t leave out details,” Chris says grimly.

“Well, sure,” Stiles says. “Don’t see anything wrong with telling you those. It’s not like you’re going to get upset or anything, I’m guessing.”

* * *

Talia comes into the kitchen, still rolling out her shoulders, and then startles as Peter raises a bleary face to her. She’d counted his heartbeat with the rest of her family as they’d driven up, but hadn’t really paid attention to where it was in the house.

“What are you doing up?” she says. Then she sees the textbooks and binders spread over the table, and catches a whiff of coffee when she breathes in. She frowns and starts to come closer to see what subject, only to stiffen as somebody irritably clears their throat behind her.

“Shoes,” Lydia says.

When Talia turns around, Lydia has one arm crossed over her, and is dangling a plastic bag in the other. Lydia’s eyes drop with disapproving speed to Talia’s muddy shoes, which Talia pulls off and tips into the bag, barely keeping herself from rolling her eyes. She appreciates a clean house as much as anyone—especially with three children who love the outdoors—but she hasn’t crossed carpet since she walked in.

Lydia hooks up the bag and pivots, stalking into the garage, and Peter lets out a soft snort. “It’s not like those are your nice shoes,” he says.

Talia goes to a cabinet and gets herself a glass from it, and then gets some orange juice and leftover pot roast from the fridge. She sits down at the table across from Peter with it, then reaches down to rub at one aching foot. Unfortunately, werewolf healing doesn’t prevent sheer exhaustion. “I don’t _have_ nice shoes anymore, not since Cora came along.”

Peter makes a face. “I had to pry my chemistry book from her earlier.”

Which reminds Talia. She glances at the schoolwork scattered in front of him, then frowns as she cuts up the roast. “I thought you don’t have homework now that you’re moving into finals.”

“I’m not _doing_ it, I’m reviewing it,” Peter says, just a touch defensively. “Those straight-As don’t just happen, you know. And whatever we do, I’m not going to let a bad semester get in the way of—”

“Oh, Peter, I’m just—I don’t even remember high school, it seems like so long,” Talia mutters. “God. And I should—damn it, I meant to pick up some library books for Laura while I was out. She and Derek are going to be behind—”

“I take it the hardware stores were clear?” Lydia says, marching back into the room. She doesn’t have the shoes anymore, but while she was in there, she retrieved one of those maps that she always seems to be marking up. “But that’s mud from the east side. Why were you down there? That’s on the opposite side from the county road and I thought we all agreed that that was the most likely road.”

Talia deliberately sticks a piece of roast in her mouth, chews it thoroughly, and then washes it down with juice before she answers. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Peter stifling an amused smile. “Yes, it is, we did, and I was over there, if you have to know, because I can’t just patrol for hunters. We have to keep up the markers if we want people to remember this is Hale territory.”

Lydia doesn’t look the least bit mollified. And as gratifying as petty nuisances are, Talia can’t help the creeping realization that indulging in them is just reinforcing this ridiculous authority figure-misbehaving child dynamic. _Child_. When Talia has three children and—and isn’t just an alpha, she’s the _pack_ alpha now.

“You should let us know ahead of time if you’re going to deviate like that,” Lydia says, turning into the hall. “Now I’ve got to recheck all the…”

 _Alarms, and local cop patrols, and last-known traffic patterns without the help of routine geomapping_ , Talia mouths along. Peter’s mouth twitches and he drags his eyes away, hunching over his textbook as if he’s really going to read that, and then he looks up again. His lips start to curve, but he and Talia manage to keep their snickers under wraps till Lydia’s footsteps are walking around the second floor.

“You’d think she’d be happy it’s clear enough to get over to that side,” Peter says after a few seconds.

He looks more inquiring than he sounds, and Talia can’t help another chuckle at her brother’s less-than-smooth methods of worming out information. “Yeah, it’s a lot clearer. I only spotted two hunters tonight, and they were both sticking close to public areas. I wasn’t that sure about sending Deaton out, but it looks like that’s actually working.”

“That, and whatever Stiles is up to,” Peter says, cocking his brow. “Derek wandered into the garage while Stiles was making a call, and he said before Stiles shooed him out, Stiles was talking with somebody about bounties. So, by the way, now Derek thinks Stiles is a paper-towel salesman.”

Talia muffles a groan as she stuffs more pot roast into her mouth. She does have to admit, she and her family are probably eating the best that they have in a long time, thanks to Scott’s cooking. Not that they were lacking in food, but she’s just never been much of a cook and that got even more difficult with a trio of curious children who have the claws to scale and open any cabinet.

Peter smirks, though he’s rubbing hard at one eye to keep the eyelid from spasming. Then he reaches over to snag a piece of roast from Talia’s plate. She regards him—he’s just about regained the weight he lost while hiding in the basement, but he’s still growing and werewolves need even more calories than regular teens—and then moves around the table corner so that they can both eat off the plate.

“Hey,” Peter says, after a few minutes of companionable munching has gone by. “So…so I hate to bring this up and spoil the mood, but…but Derek was talking about Mark again.”

The roast suddenly tastes like ashes in Talia’s mouth. She makes an effort to not spit it out, and then just swallows it half-chewed, even though it scrapes painfully against her throat on the way down. “What…what did he say?” she forces herself to ask. “Are they pretending they’re seeing him again?”

“I know nobody’s smelled anything or picked up any other signs, but shouldn’t we at least think about that?” Peter says hesitantly. “I know…I know you said to Mom that his pack wasn’t going to be an issue, but…and we still don’t know what all the uncles and cousins and everybody are up to…”

Talia grimaces at the food she no longer wants to eat, even though her stomach is still making rumbling noises. “Mark’s pack won’t call vendetta or anything like that. I know what I said back then, but—look, to be honest, he only wasn’t formally an omega because he was with me. His alpha told him they’d say he was still pack if people asked, but it was because his alpha wanted the Hale connection, not because of Mark.”

Peter scoots a little on his chair, and then ducks his head, looking both wary and embarrassed when Talia catches him. And madly curious. “Oh.”

“You should know. It’s just us now, even if I really—I wish I didn’t have to throw you into this mess,” Talia says. She stares at her plate a little longer, then puts her knife and fork down and lays her hands flat against the table, palms-down, and takes a couple deep breaths. “He was separated from them in the first place because of a failed challenge. I thought—he told me it was because he thought the alpha was putting the pack at risk, but I found out later the rest of the pack helped fight him off.”

Her brother nods slowly. He doesn’t look surprised, but to _Talia’s_ surprise, he also doesn’t show a trace of amusement, or smugness, or any sign that she’s confirming what he thought, even though she knows she is. Peter hadn’t ever much liked Mark, though he’d occasionally cozied up to the man in order to piss off their parents.

“Anyway, Mark…he started pushing for us to move back to one of our packs,” Talia slowly goes on. “To go back and take over. And I kept telling him we didn’t need to, we were raising our own pack, after all. The kids are still so young anyway, and if I ended up failing a challenge, Peter…I didn’t want to risk it. But he kept bringing it up, and we were arguing all the time and the kids saw it. I tried to keep it away from them, but Mark just…”

“If he wanted that so badly, he should’ve just done it himself,” Peter sniffs. He reaches for his mug, but then he glances at Talia and he freezes. His eyes dart nervously away from her, then come back. “I—I didn’t—”

“Well, that’s—that’s what he ended up thinking too,” Talia says after a long moment. She knows she’s scaring him but she can’t…she can’t fix whatever it is and get out the words, and at this point she just wants to get telling Peter over with. “I caught him—I thought he was having an _affair_ , Peter, of all—he wasn’t. He was at this shitty motel and he’d lured this poor omega in and—and it was some kind of spell. Trying to make himself alpha.”

Peter’s eyes widen. He starts to say something, then catches himself and hunches up a little bit. “That’s—that’s—look, I just happened to read it, all right, I wasn’t—I wasn’t ever going to do it, it’s just—Talia, you have to kill a lot of omegas to pull that off. A _lot_. And even if it works, it’s just—it’s the kind of stuff even I wouldn’t dabble with. If you don’t do it right…”

“Well, we’ll never know now, since I killed him,” Talia says.

And then she breathes out. They say it’s better to get things off your chest, that you’ll feel lighter for it, but Talia wouldn’t say she feels that. The words aren’t exactly leaving; she can still sense them hanging in the air, coloring her brother’s shocked silence like steeping tea. But she’s at least on the other side, and she’s not the only one who knows, and there is a perverse relief in that.

“I had to,” she adds after a few seconds. “He was coming after me, Peter, the things he was saying—he was saying I _drove_ him to do it, that I made him feel like he couldn’t stay if he wasn’t alpha too, and then—God, Peter, he said we didn’t need all three children, that he’d take Laura and—”

Talia can’t keep going. Her throat closes up and sticks, and she can see her claws extending across the table, then slowly withdrawing as she just tries to breathe. For a second she thinks she can see his blood on her hands.

“So—so that’s why they can’t possibly be seeing him,” Talia rasps. “I don’t know why they keep talking about him…I hope it’s not because they miss him that much, but…it’s not him. It can’t be him.”

“Oh,” Peter says. He’s shifting a lot in his seat and she’s just about to tell him he can just get up and go, she isn’t going to hold it against him, when he does get up. 

But he slips in next to her on her chair. He’s stiff, his arms tight at his sides and his fingers twitching on his lap like he keeps changing his mind about where to put them, and he’s not looking at her. But when Talia turns her head and just rests her chin on his shoulder, Peter lets out a long sigh and relaxes.

“I always thought he was an asshole,” Peter says. He pauses and she can sense him glancing at her, and then he makes an awkward jerk with the arm between them. It’s almost pushing Talia off him, but before she can do more than rock a little, his hand’s dropped onto her leg so his knuckles are just nudging her wrist. “It’s a good thing the kids all look like you. And sound like you. And—and are you sure he was the father, anyway?”

Talia snorts, and then nearly chokes herself on her own breath as that goes too far up her nose. She coughs a few times, then lets out a short laugh. It’s brittle and thin, but it _does_ make her feel better, loosens up her chest some. She laughs again, a little longer, and then puts her arm around Peter’s waist and squeezes him till he grunts in protest.

“We couldn’t stay there,” Talia eventually says. “I took care of everything, I don’t think they’ll find his body, but I just—so I called our parents. I didn’t know what else to do, Peter. I know I could’ve just kept going alone with the kids, but when I sat them down and told them their daddy wasn’t coming back, they just…they were so quiet. They just said okay, Mommy, like it wasn’t—wasn’t a shock, and they’re too young. They deserve—they need a real pack. And our parents were bad, but they at least watched out for you.”

“As long as you did what you were told,” Peter puts in, but he’s nodding. He leans back so they can look at each other and he’s so young himself, but he’s still here, still sitting with her. Still not put off. “Talia, I—I promise, no matter how annoying they are, I’m never going to leave your kids. I—I’m—you came back, so I’ll come back. And I’ll make sure they know about pack, and they don’t ever bring around people who don’t know what that means.”

Talia’s too surprised to react for a second, and then she smiles. Peter flushes and she can tell his pride’s rearing its head, but she pulls him over and kisses his hair before that can get too far. He squirms a little, then huffs in half-hearted irritation.

“You’re a good brother,” she says. “I wish I’d taken you along in the first place. You probably would’ve picked up on what Mark was doing faster than me. That omega, what was left of—God, Peter. I’m always going to see that in my nightmares.”

“Well, at least now you can’t see anything else that’s worse?” Peter says. He wiggles again, and when she loosens her grip, he scrubs at his head where she kissed him before sighing. “I thought Mom and Dad were bad, but…”

“Because they were.” Talia grimaces and for a second she’s resentful of how the warmth in her is fading, and all the worries are rushing back. She just feels as if they never really get a break these days. It’s like since she opened that motel room door, she’s been on a never-ending, heart-bursting run to keep ahead of things. “And honestly, Peter, challenge fights can do worse than that. Once we get these hunters out of the way, we’ll have to deal with that. That idiot Mark, he’s _met_ our family, and he really thought one alpha could—”

Peter suddenly straightens up. “If you kill Gerard, that’d prove you’re strong, wouldn’t it? I know you were just mad at Deaton, but—if you think about it. He’s still the acting head of the Argent family, however he got that position, and if he dies going after us, it actually works out.”

“Are you actually saying we _should_ use him to scare off our family?” Talia says.

“He’s coming here anyway and we’ll have to kill him one way or the other,” Peter says irritably. “And I know you promised Chris that you’d let him have a shot at his father, but honestly, do you really think he’s up to it?”

Talia can detect more than just a preoccupation with a brilliant idea in her brother’s tone, and she’s certainly aware that it’s an uneasy household any way you cut it. Argent’s been reasonably good about keeping out of their way, but when you’re living in the same house, run-ins are unavoidable and he doesn’t make much of an attempt to be pleasant when he is confronted. She’s had a few nasty exchanges with him herself, and she can guess what’s happened when Peter’s had to deal with him.

“Anyway, it’d be bad planning to just rely on him, even if he was an alpha on your level,” Peter goes on. “I’m not saying break your word, I’m just saying—”

“No. No, I think you’re right. We can’t count on him to make sure of Gerard,” Talia says. Then she pokes her brother in the side. “I wouldn’t write off his abilities so easily, Peter. He might be just a month along, and with no alpha to guide him, but he was born and raised a hunter the way we were born and raised werewolves. Killing is in his blood, and he’s got his vendetta to motivate him on top of that. But that’s the problem, if you ask me. He’s too angry.”

Peter snorts. “Honestly, I go back and forth on whether he really wants to kill his father, or whether deep down he wants Gerard to kill him. But it’s not our family.”

“Not our business,” Talia agrees. She’s about to add more when she catches Peter stifling a yawn. Talia pauses, then winces as she remembers the time. As werewolves, they might prefer later hours, but they’re not truly nocturnal. And anyway, they still have to live in a diurnal human society. “Though first we have to find out exactly what he intends to do about his father, before we can make our own plans. And to do that, I think we need to go to bed.”

“You mean me,” Peter mutters. Halfway through it, another yawn catches him, and this one’s so forceful that he can’t fight it off. He scrubs irritably at the side of his face, then looks at his schoolwork. “Well, I guess I can still make an A if I don’t get the hang of oxidation-reduction equations. That’s only five percent of the grade.”

“We can always send Stiles to see the principal again if you don’t get one,” Talia says. As much as Stiles’ interference irks her—it reminds her of how poor a mother she’s been for the past couple months—she has to admit it’s saved them a lot of trouble. Peter needs the time away from their hassles that school gives him.

He also seems to actually like being driven back and forth to that, which Talia suspects has a lot to do with getting to pry at Stiles for magic and future knowledge. So it’s a little bit of a surprise when Peter makes a disgusted face, then shakes his head as he gets up and reaches to pull together his things.

“The last thing I want is to give Stiles another reason to lord it over me,” Peter mumbles when he catches her looking at him. “I’ll still keep trying to see what he’ll drop, all right? It’s just he’s really…I don’t know, sometimes I don’t know whether I’d rather have Chris swinging his pain around, as if he’s the only one here with dead parents, or have Stiles mixing up…”

“You don’t have to do either, you know,” Talia says, amused and worried in equal measures. “You could always take a shot at one of the others.”

“Oh, no. You’re the alpha, you get to deal with Lydia,” Peter says, lifting his stack of books and binders off the table. “I feel no shame in admitting that she makes me nervous.”

Talia makes a face at him. He makes one back and then shrugs diffidently. He takes a step out, then twists back to look at her.

“I can deal with Stiles, he’s just…kind of much sometimes. And Chris is just a bunch of—” Peter flashes his fangs, snapping them together as Talia snorts “—and I think it’s very clear that the best way to get things out of Scott is to just have Derek and Laura sit and stare at him. Are you coming up soon?”

“I’m going to eat, and then I need to fill in one of them about the night,” Talia says. “But I’ll be up after that. Don’t wait up for me again.”

“I know, I know,” Peter says. He makes as if to go, then hesitates again. “It’s just—I’m getting used to having you to wait for, again.”

And then he walks off. For all his attempts at scheming, Talia thinks, that tightness back in her chest, Peter’s at his most devastating when he’s just being honest. Her little brother, less little now, but she means to keep him too. She might make mistakes, but she swears she won’t make the same one twice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the reference to the anti-psychotic: obviously, I'm making this up, pseudo-science and all that, but my line of thinking is that werewolf shifts involve a major change in mental state, so something that would disrupt your ability to perceive extreme shifts in reality (such as the hallucinations experienced during a psychotic break) would negatively affect your ability to alter your mind to accept the werewolf mentality, and thus make you unable to shift.
> 
> The fake mountain ash is a trade secret, just like Stiles says.


	4. Chapter 4

Lydia is not their best fighter in the field. Physical engagement isn’t her strong point and she’s perfectly comfortable with that. There are plenty of critical noncombatant activities that somebody has to take care of, and that’s never been Scott’s wheelhouse, cooking and nursing and small children aside, and while Stiles is good at those, they don’t hold his attention as well as the promise of violence and skullduggery, as he likes to put it. So divide and conquer, she concentrates on her strengths and she finds it fulfilling, which is more likely to last than happiness.

That said, she does sometimes feel the itch to get up and go out. Sitting at home and looking at her computer screen and her phone and her files, she knows intellectually that the elements of her arrangements don’t need her physical presence to continue moving into position. And she knows that often it’d be detrimental to have her actually there. But that doesn’t relieve the need to just—not be there, doing nothing but waiting in between messages.

She hears someone in the hall and goes out, but just catches Peter’s back disappearing into the Hales’ bedroom. Chris is also in the house, but when Scott isn’t around he generally stays in their bedroom with the door firmly shut, coming out only for necessities; he doesn’t seem any friendlier with Scott than the rest of them, but he does recognize, sensibly, that Scott is just about the only one in the house who will step between him and any of the others.

Although lately Chris has been talking to Stiles a little bit. Lydia hasn’t had the time to catch up on that—Stiles has just said it’s the usual Gerard-hate session—and she stops and contemplates that bedroom door, then dismisses the idea. If she’s going that route, better to tackle Scott whenever he’s back.

He actually should be in soon, so Lydia ultimately decides she’ll go downstairs and wait for him. She’s nearly to the kitchen when she registers the soft sounds of somebody moving around in there, and realizes she didn’t hear Talia going up.

Lydia pauses, then shakes her head and forges ahead. When she walks into the kitchen, Talia goes still and watchful, a palpable feeling of resentment coming from the woman, but Lydia ignores that and goes about getting herself some milk and a slice of cheesecake from the fridge. She takes those into the living room, and starts rooting through the small, but rapidly-growing, collection of DVDs that has appeared near the TV.

Far too much children’s programming and cult movies, she thinks idly. Netflix exists and they’ve been here long enough; she might just have to sign up if Stiles can’t remember to grab something outside of the horror genre when he’s trawling eBay’s video section.

“Why do you people watch those, anyway?” Talia says behind her. “They’re ridiculous and you know they’re not true. Poofing vampires—God, if corpse disposal was that easy, we’d be overrun with hunters.”

“Research,” Lydia says. She finally finds a non-horror movie and pops it in. It’s a teen coming-of-age flick, which isn’t really her cup of tea either, but she consoles herself with the thought that she can at least catch up on her fashion history. 

Talia’s still standing at the doorway.

“Believe it or not, there are people in this world whose only context for supernatural happenings are shows like that one, and it helps to understand how they’re going to view things,” Lydia sighs. “Sometimes it even makes coming up with the alibi easier.”

“You know, when I was younger, sometimes we’d pop those in at family reunions and make fun of them. Some good drinking games,” Talia says.

Lydia glances over the couch as she settles on it with her food. Talia’s leaning against the doorway, her hair out of that slipshod bun for once, absently twisting a soiled napkin in one hand. “You were friendly enough for that?”

“It depended on the reunion,” Talia says. She presses her lips together as if she’s only just realizing that they’re speaking civilly, and it’s leaving a sour taste in her mouth. Normally when she and Lydia are talking, even if they’re in agreement, she spits out everything as if it’s an insult.

And they actually do agree most of the time. When she’s not losing her temper, Talia generally has a good head for strategy and appreciates the need for a little subtlety—and unlike her brother, she also seems to understand that subtlety encompasses more than just wrapping a layer of sarcasm around one’s manipulation. On the other hand, Peter mostly seems to have moved on past the initial secret-keeping—shocking, that they hadn’t showed all their cards when they were first introduced—but Talia still manages to insinuate that into every work discussion.

Suspicion is a good alpha trait, Lydia supposes, but as a day-to-day matter, it gets very tiring. “Yes?”

“I picked up a hunter off that motel behind the strip mall,” Talia says. “He was just eating dinner, and then he went back to his room and started up some porn, so I think he’s set for the night. And another one at the twenty-four-hour laundromat, but he was saying to one of the other people there that he’d be leaving town in the morning.”

“Was that Thompson?” Lydia asks. “The laundromat.”

“Yes,” Talia says.

Lydia eats some cheesecake. “I’ll update the tracker, and Scott and Chris can go see if he’s checked out tomorrow.”

“Isn’t Scott already on tonight’s shift?” Talia says. “Why wouldn’t Stiles—”

“Stiles is out too and Scott’s less likely to commit homicide when he’s sleep-deprived,” Lydia says. “And if this is trying to figure out why Stiles is out, you can tell Peter that he and Stiles can chat about it on the way home from school tomorrow.”

Talia’s quiet the way that a large, dangerous predator stalking prey is quiet. Then she lets out a long, harsh breath that is not a sigh, but that is considerably more aggressive. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you people, I do not appreciate you treating my brother as if he’s a foregone conclusion.”

Lydia watches the so-called mean girl of the high school sashay down the hall wearing a hideous pair of heels and carrying a purse that looks like someone lopped the legs off an armadillo and attached a strap. “Do you not understand the whole point of time travel? If we really thought that things could never be changed—”

“I don’t buy it. I don’t buy you,” Talia says sharply. “Scott, I buy, and I don’t even have to ask how he and my children got along. I can tell every time he looks at them. I don’t understand half of what Stiles says, but I believe him too. Nobody’s as bitter as he is unless they really cared at some point. But you—you weren’t friends with my children. I just can’t see that.”

“I never said that I was,” Lydia says, looking at her. “You should stop assuming we’re holding back information all the time. Sometimes it’s just not there.”

“Well, secrets would at least tell me you had some involvement. I’m seriously starting to think that the only reason you’re here is because you have nothing better to do,” Talia snaps.

Lydia keeps looking at her. Talia looks back—werewolves, predictably, can’t resist a staring contest—till her exhaustion starts to catch up to her. A twitch is starting to flicker her left eyelid before she suddenly tilts her head up, listening to something on the second floor. She purses her lips, glances at Lydia, and then snorts and turns away.

“I wasn’t friends with your kids,” Lydia says, turning back to the television. “Not in my original timeline, and not in most of the ones we’ve been to. But I owed them, and I never got to pay that back, and I don’t like that. If you can even try to understand.”

Talia pauses. Lydia doesn’t think the woman turns back, because she doesn’t have that niggle that somebody’s looking at her, but Talia’s footsteps slow, then stop. Then start up again, and continue right up the stairs and across the second floor. A muffled ‘Mommy’ drifts down as the movie hits a lull, and then Lydia hears a door shut.

The cheesecake is gone and Lydia’s gotten herself a bag of cheesy popcorn when Stiles comes home. He walks by, comes back, and then comes into the room. “This is bad,” he says.

“What are you talking about? Deaton’s still out of town, hunters are down, no sign of another Hale and Gerard was still in Oregon as of two hours ago,” Lydia says. She pops a kernel into her mouth and then wipes the cheesy dust off her fingertip and onto the side of the bag. “This is about as good as we’re going to get before people start dying again.”

“I meant the movie,” Stiles says. “I have no idea what this is and I’m clearly coming _in media res_ , but I can already predict that this brilliant plan to upend the bitch queen’s just going to end in public humiliation at the big dance, a gross romantic misunderstanding, and probably a gratuitous dance number, even though this isn’t a Bollywood flick.”

Lydia rolls her eyes. “You are a walking spoiler.”

Stiles laughs. And then he lingers, looking at her. She glances twice his way, then moves her feet so that he can sit down. “Seriously,” he says. “You okay?”

“Talia,” Lydia says.

“She just doesn’t get you.” Then Stiles reaches over and grabs some popcorn. “To be fair, ninety-nine percent of the population won’t ever get you, but that’s the downside of evolution. Some people just gotta be ahead of the curve.”

“I just don’t understand why it’s so difficult for people to accept that motives aren’t as simple as—as—as in a stupid movie,” Lydia mutters after a moment. “Tragic lost love, there’s never a problem with that.”

Stiles looks sharply at her, and then pulls his phone out to check it. He inhales and it sounds like a question, involving a certain mutual acquaintance whose name starts with ‘S’ and ends with ‘t,’ but then he stops himself.

“Missed chances, that’s easy to swallow too. But—” Then Lydia cuts herself off. She eats popcorn instead.

The movie plays on. Stiles looks at her, looks at the movie, and then sighs and moves over till he’s running into her legs. This time she doesn’t move them, so he sighs again and lifts them over his lap, and then stretches his arm over the back of the couch so it’s running behind her head. Lydia resists a little longer, then reluctantly tilts so that she’s resting her head against his shoulder.

“You know it’s personal for you, too,” Stiles says quietly. “It’s always personal. And that’s okay. It’s not like you’re breaking your genius organizer streak by admitting you used to be a mess. It’s just—we didn’t know enough before, Lydia, even if we’d tried, we wouldn’t have been able to do what we can do now.”

“I know. I know, it’s just…I know I don’t miss things the same way you two do,” Lydia says. She rubs her cheek against his shoulder, then gives him the bag of popcorn and closes her eyes. “I used to think that that was a good thing, that at least it doesn’t hurt me as much. But I think it does, it’s just different. Maybe nobody ever had me the way you and Scott had people, not even my parents—but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss that feeling.”

Stiles hums tunelessly, then kisses her forehead. “We love you, Lyds.”

“I know you do. But it’s not—I just wish, sometimes,” she says. “I can’t help it.”

“It’s okay,” Stiles says. “And hey, if not, there’s always the next timeline.”

It’s a bad, hollow joke. But Lydia is too tired, all of a sudden, and so she lets it go, and she and Stiles just watch the movie.

* * *

After their argument in the car, nobody tries to put Chris and Peter in the same small space for a while. Stiles also is a little scarce, and when he is around, he’s absentminded and not really engaged with all the rambling he does. Which is fine with Peter. He’s wrapping up finals and putting off people at school who want to know all about why he’s now living in town with his sister and some kind of commune—their idea, Peter just ran with it—and sharing babysitting and patrol duties, so his schedule is plenty full. He doesn’t need extra time with somebody who thought it was okay to corner him and then acted like Peter needs someone to fight his battles for him.

They do all sit down and talk over the monster. The monster’s a little low-priority compared to the hunters and Gerard Argent, since there haven’t been any signs of it since the death of Peter’s and Talia’s parents, but Talia covers off on it. Peter repeats what he told her before, while Chris has apparently reconsidered and decided to be less baiting and more helpful.

“Humanish, but some animal features,” he says shortly. “It moved fast so I couldn’t get much, but it had claws, and pointed ears. Red eyes. Not like an alpha werewolf, not shiny, matte. I saw you had standard anti-spirits wards but it crossed those fine.”

“Sounds like it’s not fully dead,” Stiles says. “Did it notice you at all?”

Chris hesitates. “Yeah, I think so. But as long as I stayed about a hundred yards from the house, it ignored me. It was focused on Peter. And it’s smart enough, it’d hide whenever a hunter came within half a mile of the house, so it’s not just a lost spirit or a poltergeist.”

“Hide?” Talia says.

“Disappear,” Chris amends. “It’d disappear, and then it’d come back. But it’s not afraid of werewolves.”

Talia presses her lips together, while Peter’s wishing yet again that _all_ the hunters would go so they could get back to their house and he can get to their library. He knows the handful of books Talia brought back with their parents’ bodies won’t have what he needs, but the number of creatures who aren’t wary of a werewolf isn’t that large. If he could get into the library, he doesn’t think it’d take him that long to figure it out.

“What happened when I drove up?” Talia asks. “Were you there for that?”

“Yeah, I was. The thing, it disappeared, and then I saw it trailing your car as you came up to the house. Then it…” Chris hesitates again, but because he can’t find the right words, not because he’s reluctant “…it sort of fell apart. It did this, this angry shiver—”

“How do you know it was angry?” Peter asks.

Chris doesn’t look at him, just looks at Talia. “I don’t know, I just felt that it was angry. Maybe it’s got empath traits. Anyway, it shivered and sort of dissolved, and I actually thought it might be gone. But then I saw it again when I was putting your parents’ bodies on the porch. That’s why I was still around for you to see me.”

Talia looks grim, but Peter can tell that his sister hiding her worry, and he can guess that it’s because she doesn’t have any idea what the thing might be. Stiles looks thoughtful, and he and Lydia exchange some meaningful glances before Talia abruptly concludes the meeting.

Peter knows that Stiles and Lydia are doing research into what Chris said, and that’s really the only reason why he remotely misses having the man around. “I know he’s getting in references from all over the place,” Peter complains to his sister. “We all see the Fedex boxes. I just don’t know where the books go. They can’t all fit in that bedroom. Lydia’s got too many outfits.”

“You notice what Lydia’s wearing?” Talia says, amused.

“Only because you talk about how you don’t know how she manages those heels,” Peter shoots back. “Anyway, I think Stiles is avoiding me on purpose.”

Talia laughs and ruffles his hair, but her eyes are watching him closely. “I don’t know that they actually care about our opinions that much. Peter, you do know—”

“What?” Peter mutters. “What, you told me to see what I could get from him.”

“I know, but I didn’t mean—” Talia sighs “—you just remember, we’re not desperate, Peter. We’re on the back foot, but we still have choices, and I’ll back you up.”

“I know. I know, I’m not a baby,” Peter says irritably, stalking off.

He doesn’t even understand what Talia’s worried about. All he and Stiles do is talk—and talk and talk and Peter used to think there wasn’t much he didn’t want to know about in the world, but since he met Stiles, that list has doubled. At least. Stiles just always seems to know about some topic that isn’t what Peter actually wants to know about right then, but that has enough interesting nuggets sprinkled in it that Peter can’t ever really drag the conversation back.

The man’s just really annoying, Peter thinks. “And just as bad as Dad about keeping things away from us,” he says under his breath, settling down at the kitchen table with study materials for his last exam.

The garage door cranks open. Peter looks up because he hadn’t heard a car drive up, but the wards don’t light up, so…the only one not at home is Stiles.

Who comes into the kitchen a couple minutes later. “Hey, not-evil Peter,” he says, walking over to the paper-towel rack. He looks at it, then frowns and pokes the roll. “I could’ve sworn that this was brand-new this morning…did Derek toss his cookies again?”

“What happened to your shirt?” Peter finally says, hauling his jaw off the floor.

Stiles normally goes around looking like he dove into a Goodwill store and dressed in whatever stuck to him, but right now he’s naked from the waist up and what’s left from the waist down is soaked wet and clingy. He’s—he’s—Peter instinctively tips up his binder the second he feels burning in his cheeks, and then hates himself for it. And just keeps staring as Stiles stretches up to get a fresh roll of paper towels out of a high cabinet, and the muscles of his back flex down and the cheeks of his ass tighten towards each other and God.

It’s not fair. Peter’s a _werewolf_ , and yes, he knows he’s still got some growing to do, but he still has barely any definition on his arms or chest. Stiles is really only a couple inches taller—and Peter thinks that’s shrunk just a little since the time travelers arrived—and isn’t that much broader in the shoulders, but he has this really nice, lean body, with smooth flat muscles that look like they’ll get the job done without needing to bulge like a weight-lifter.

“…crime-scene evidence,” Stiles is saying as he turns around. He pauses, looking at Peter, holding a wad of paper towels up against the side of his neck, and then lets out a sheepish chuckle as he ducks back into the garage. “And well, I didn’t want to annoy Lyds by dripping it everywhere. I would’ve tossed on my spare change, except I forgot to pack a new one after my last trip.”

Peter realizes his binder’s nearly clipping his nose and drops it as if it was made of red-hot metal. Then he swears under his breath and presses his hand to his still-flushed cheek. “You go through more clothes than us werewolves do. Even the kids don’t tear up that many outfits in a week.”

“If you were dealing with the idiots I was, I think you’d be buying your wardrobe at the bulk-goods store, too,” Stiles says. He comes back in with a duffel bag and a ratty-looking towel that he tosses over one of the kitchen chairs before sitting on that. “Is it naptime?”

“Yes,” Peter says, sneaking a peek as Stiles unzips the bag. Based on the angular bulges in it, he’d guessed that Stiles was bringing in some books, and he gets confirmation when Stiles pulls on a pair of thin cotton gloves and takes out a dusty, cracked-leather book that smells of vellum and iron-gall ink and library mold. “But I can get Talia.”

“Well, I guess if you want to, but I’m gonna warn you that I don’t actually have anything yet. And we’re trying to be more considerate with you guys, but even I can’t make hard-copy cross-referencing look interesting,” Stiles says. Then he frowns and pulls off the paper towels he’s been using to mop at himself. He squishes the wad a little, grimaces as it drips on the floor, and gets up to throw that away and get himself a new bunch.

Peter waits till the man’s back is turned and then cranes out of his chair to try and see the book. He can tell that the script is Greek, but he can’t read it from where he is; the ink’s too faded. But he got a glimpse of the cover as Stiles put the book down and he thinks the lettering on that might actually be in Latin. “Why don’t you just keep the roll with you? We just do that with Derek now, and he takes it to bed with him.”

Stiles sputters a little. “What, seriously? Oh, God, the multiverse just keeps finding new ways to humiliate the poor guy, with his cuddle-toy paper— _hey_!”

He turns faster than Peter was counting on, and then he’s fast enough to lunge over and grab Peter’s wrist before Peter can snatch it back from the book. “I just—you people still aren’t telling us _anything_ ,” Peter snaps, while his stupid immature face blushes yet again. “You just go in and out whenever you feel like, while we have to wait around for you to escort us.”

“That’s because we actually talked about it and pointed out that looking like you have more numbers is good, and since we’re pretty unknown quantities here, nobody’s going to know right off how to deal with us, and you and Talia said okay,” Stiles says. He’s annoyingly calm about it. He’s also still holding onto Peter’s wrist, and he keeps a light but firm grip on that as he bends down and riffles in his bag and then…comes up with another one of those cotton gloves that he starts to put onto Peter’s hand. “Also, I’m pretty sure I remember Talia telling us if we made you get bad grades, she’d eat our hearts.”

Peter yanks his hand free—he has a sinking suspicion Stiles let him, werewolf strength or not—and fiddles with the half-on glove without pulling it off. “She did not. You exaggerate. Constantly.”

“Yeah, well, gotta keep up my yarn-spinning talents.” Stiles looks at Peter for another second, then tosses down the matching glove. Then he sits down at his chair, pulls a second book out from the bag, and puts it in front of Peter. “I actually have to return these, and I really, really don’t want to have to go on the multi-state rampage I’d have to do to deal with their owner if I don’t bring them back in mint condition, so watch the little claw tips, okay?”

Then he takes out a notebook and picks up his book again, and starts…starts working. Peter watches him, then puts his hand out towards the book Stiles gave him. Then takes it back. Pulls the gloves on, suppressing an irritated noise—he’s not the kids, he knows about handling old books—and then gingerly picks up his book. And opens it. And lowers it to find Stiles apparently not checking up on him.

“Is this for the monster?” Peter says.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, writing in his notebook. “We’ve ruled out most of the common types of spirits, and I don’t think it’s a shapeshifter or a really nasty astral projection either—”

“How’d you rule it out? Why didn’t you tell us?” Peter says. “Or take us along?”

Stiles looks like he’s still reading the book, but his pen is tapping at the notebook instead of writing. Then he puts that down and lifts his head as if he’s very aggravated and trying not to let it show. “Doing that doesn’t actually require anything except reviewing what protective spells I saw on your house, or put on it myself, when Scott and I were up there, and figuring out what types of things would at least make them ping, and putting that together with Chris saying it crossed the wards but nothing happened.”

“I’m just—you say you’re helping but it’s like you want to do all of this for us,” Peter says, nettled. “It’s like you think we’re babies. We were here before you and we dealt with a lot of bad things without you. And before you complain, it’s not being ungrateful, all right? It’s just it’s—it’s _our_ lives.”

“I know, and we’re trying to—it’s just we’ve seen it get way shittier than this,” Stiles says, also irritated. “You have no idea—”

“Then why don’t you tell us? Instead of just waving your hand and acting like you’ve been through every warzone and then some,” Peter snaps.

Stiles opens his mouth and he’s going to snap right back…and then he abruptly slouches back, looking off to the side with a bitter twist to his mouth. A trickle of water goes down his front and he absently pats at it with a paper towel, and Peter annoys himself by noticing that whole thing in the first place.

“I don’t know, because…because it’s really hard to remember what it’s like to _not_ have been through every warzone and then some,” Stiles says after a moment, in an oddly soft tone. “You’d think the practice would make us better, but it just…makes us assholes. You just keep seeing the same people, and hoping it’ll be different, and then it is but they still die and…and even if they’re not _your_ people, they’re still…you still cared enough about them in the first place to try and help, right? So you end up caring about them too.”

“Is it…is it the same thing that happens every time?” Peter asks. He feels weirdly awkward about it—almost guilty, even though he doesn’t care about the man’s feelings. “The same…apocalypse, or…”

Stiles snorts, and it’s amused, but not in a pleasant way. “No, it’s…well, that’s…okay. So the story—there was this disease in our world, _our_ timeline, and it hit all the supernatural people. Because before that, normal people found out about us—”

Peter chokes.

“Yeah, I know, and that’s a long story too and it wasn’t really any one person’s fault, it was just a bunch of collective mistakes and bad timing and well, technology advances to the point that anybody can film in high-definition…anyway.” Stiles grimaces at the paper towel he’s shredding, and then leans forward to rest his elbows on the table, still shredding. “It wasn’t like, a reactionary governmental genocidal thing, like out of the comics. It’s just…supernatural people live in isolated pockets for generations, and then they all come out and start mixing, and turns out the isolated pockets are also a good _de facto_ quarantine for diseases that’d otherwise destroy us.”

“So that’s what happened,” Peter says.

“They made a vaccine, but not in time. There wasn’t—for vaccines to really work, it’s a numbers thing. You need to get enough people vaccinated that the number of potential disease carriers goes…I can draw you the curves later if you’re really interested, but if you don’t get enough, the disease basically has enough fodder to keep going, even if you have survivors from early waves,” Stiles says. “Like us.”

He’s silent for a few minutes. Peter almost asks a question, then catches himself at the expression on Stiles’ face. There’s obviously more to tell, and it’s obviously, somehow, _worse_ than what Stiles has already said.

“And the thing with carriers—so the supernatural population isn’t just the people who show it, it includes a lot of people who have perfectly normal lives, but they just have this little bit in their background that maybe will show up in their kids, or their kids’ kids…anyway, so actually, it ended up a civilization-ending thing,” Stiles goes on. “Magic-collapsing, too, because everybody was trying all this crazy shit to stop it—that’s why Beacon Hills keeps coming up. It’s got enough of a power well that it’s always one of the last places to go dark.”

“And that’s where my family comes in?” Peter says.

“Yeah, I mean. Beacon Hills is always Hale territory.” Stiles’ mouth writhes a little, as if he’s trying to snarl, and then stiffens into a thin, tight line that barely moves as he talks. “Derek and Cora, they were dying but they—they turned that into a last boost, made it enough to get Scott and me and Lydia out. The time travel thing.”

Peter relaxes, and then realizes he’d tensed up in the first place. “And then you fixed it.”

“Oh, man, if it was—” Stiles starts, laughing. It takes him a little while to stop himself, and get that edgy tone out of his voice. “No, see, the thing is, if you survive? It doesn’t mean you’re not infectious. And Scott never was great at science but Lyds and I should’ve known but—okay. So. Yeah. We get out. And start over. And infect everybody all over again.”

“So you—you infected another timeline?” Peter says incredulously.

“Yeah,” Stiles says flatly. “And before you ask, way before we got here, we figured it out and holed up till we finally just—just _excised_ that shit from us, and now we can’t infect now. But we—we fucked up. Bad. So we said, we gotta make sure this doesn’t happen again. And that’s what we do now. It’s not always the disease—like here, we hijacked a CDC lab, did some tests, and it looks like the virus burned itself out generations ago—but it’s always fucking Beacon Hills. Go figure.”

And then he appears to be done. Peter waits a few minutes, because Stiles is still just shredding that paper towel, but the man doesn’t say anything else.

It’s hard to think of what to say, anyway. The story is true—it has to be, just with the way Stiles looked and smelled and sounded all through telling it—and Peter doesn’t have too much of a hard time picturing certain parts of it. Some of it does sound like the comics or the movies, and some of it sounds like the horror stories that werewolf parents tell their children, and some of it just sounds like an amplified version of the things Peter and his family have always dealt with, just because of what they are. But it’s just…it’s just Peter thinks he probably should feel certain emotions about it. Disgust. Fear. Hatred.

And he doesn’t, he thinks. Mostly, which is the part he struggles with the hardest, he thinks he feels…he thinks he feels sorry for them. “Didn’t you say you’ve never jumped this far back before?” he asks.

Stiles looks up sharply, and his gaze is intense enough to make Peter stop. “Yes,” he says after a second. “Yeah, that was…like I said, it’s Beacon Hills, and your family ends up being involved. And we’ve actually, you know, _stopped_ shit from happening now, we’re good enough, but we keep finding timelines…Lyds and me got curious. I mean, scientific method, you test variables, well, we were testing common elements like the Nemeton, the Argents, Deucalion, your coma—”

“Blackwood?” Peter frowns. Then he starts. “My what?”

“It’s not going to happen, chill,” Stiles says dismissively. “The point is, whatever we did, we still ended up dealing with goddamn Judgment Day. So then Lydia and I started thinking, maybe it’s the wrong time frame. Maybe it’s not intervention, it’s prevention. So…we came back to see.”

“Oh,” Peter says. He shifts in place a few times, starts to poke at his book and then catches himself. Then he looks up and Stiles is still watching him like that, like he’s…like he’s interesting and not in a patronizing way at all. Which makes Peter uncomfortable and he wills himself not to blush again. “So you didn’t say what else besides disease.”

An amused glint comes into Stiles’ eyes. “You really just want to know,” he says. “Apocalypse junkie?”

“Well, is curiosity a crime?” Peter mutters.

“I guess it depends on who’s doing it,” Stiles says. He’s going to say more, but then he changes it, whatever it was. “You’re doing all right at the moment.”

“I’m going to be eighteen in a couple weeks, if the world’s going to end first, I’d like to know before we plan a party,” Peter snaps. And then wonders why on earth he just keeps—giving things to the man like that, on a silver platter with a ribbon bow on top.

Stiles blinks hard, and then outright grins. “Peter, if you want a party, we’ll throw you a party,” he says. “Trust me, we’re really, really good at that now.”

Peter huffs, but he can’t help thinking about it a little, as they both go back to reading. His parents weren’t exactly big on things like that, with the whole not attracting attention worry, and being on ever-changing terms with their relatives. Talia used to at least take him out and treat him to a meal, and he and she would give each other gifts, but they couldn’t be big things or else their parents might notice and pull the whole pack-ownership routine. His sister has mentioned it a couple times since she came back, but with everything going on, he hasn’t gotten his hopes up.

“I like chocolate ganache,” Peter says

“With or without mint jelly?” Stiles says.

Peter stifles a hungry noise, and then glares over the books. “You keep cheating with the prior knowledge.”

“Like you wouldn’t,” Stiles says peaceably. “Custom torte it is. Anything else?”

“Can we get into our house?” Peter says after a moment. Then he scrunches in his seat to avoid the inevitable exasperated look. “I’m not asking to move back into it while we still can’t keep hunters out of the woods, all right, I just—I still have some things in there I’d like.”

Stiles draws in a slow breath, which isn’t quite as frustrated as Peter was expecting but which is still reluctant. “I can’t promise that,” he finally says. “Too many moving parts right now. But we’ll see, all right? Scott and I might be able to make a trip out.”

“I guess that’ll do,” Peter mutters.

“See, we’re nicer,” Stiles says. He’s looking at Peter, who huffs and ignores him. Stiles laughs, and for once it doesn’t sound sour. “Well, well. So let me know if that thing actually has something on _shtriga_ , would you? The bibliography I checked was really vague.”

“Okay,” Peter says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this isn't necessarily what Lydia is watching, but Stiles is referencing _She's All That_.
> 
> All the stuff about vaccines is accurate (look up 'herd immunity'). It's also true that with some diseases, even after you've fully recovered, you can still be infectious to others. I was thinking of shingles, which is caused by the same virus as chickenpox. Once you've had chickenpox, you still carry the virus for the disease in you (even after full recovery, and showing no further symptoms), and if it reactivates as shingles, you can infect other people with chickenpox (real science is twistier than fiction!).
> 
> The idea about a serious epidemic breaking out after long-separated populations suddenly start mixing again comes from real life, too. It happens all the time with livestock introduction; usually the livestock introduce diseases to nearby related wildlife and end up decimating the wildlife populations. Or you can look at Native Americans and smallpox from European settlers (and syphilis probably going the other way).


	5. Chapter 5

Scott gets in late from patrol, which didn’t turn up anything. And that’s a good thing, but it also means that he spent the entire shift alerted for action that didn’t happen, and he’s exhausted. So he doesn’t really think when he kicks off his shoes and pulls off his shirt, and then crawls into bed.

There’s already a body in it, which rears wildly up and then throws the blankets in Scott’s face. He slashes through them and rams his head and shoulders through the holes, and has Chris pinned under him before he…well, his brain wasn’t working anyway. Damn it.

“What—what are you doing?” Chris hisses. He’s frozen in a submissive position, chin tilted up to bare his throat, wrists iron-stiff but unmoving in Scott’s grip, but his voice is low and gravelly and just above a growl.

Scott’s brain still needs a couple seconds to sort things out and remember that he and Chris share the room but they never actually share the bed. The few times that they’re both in, Scott sits up, or goes to the roof.

“Sorry,” he says. 

He lets go of Chris and starts to get off the bed, but then gets tangled up in the…he starts to pull off the bedsheets, only to put his arm through a hole he doesn’t even remember making. Then he looks around at the scraps which are only now gently floating to the ground and he sighs. It’s so late that even Stiles has gone to bed, and they’re probably going to wake people digging out fresh blankets. Especially if Scott can’t make his brain remember whether they put those in the basement or the attic…or if they even have any, since right, Cora decided she now hates carrots and spit up her meal all over the bed yesterday.

Chris is still staring at him. “I’m tired, I wasn’t thinking,” Scott adds, picking off bedsheet strips.

Then he gets up and starts collecting all of those. He starts putting them in the trashcan, but quickly realizes they won’t all fit and just sweeps them up as best he can into a heap on the floor before going downstairs for a plastic bag big enough to hold them.

When he comes back up, Chris has gotten off the bed and thrown on a pair of jeans. Chris hangs back at first, but eventually squats down and silently helps Scott clean up. By then Scott’s thought it over and figures he’ll check in the basement first and just hope that they still have a spare blanket.

Scott ties off the bag and takes it out to the garage, then goes downstairs to try and find the bedding. They’ve been here less than a month, but having so many people in the house means somebody goes shopping nearly every day—it’s just a really, really good thing Stiles and Lydia understand investments and set up huge bank accounts whenever they go—and the basement is already crowded with boxes. It’s organized, even Talia didn’t want to fight with Stiles on his system, but it’s still tricky to worm through the narrow, leg-wide aisles and get to the right area.

Thankfully, the blanket’s there. Scott heaves it out of its packaging, then folds the plastic under his arm and starts back across the basement. He gets about two steps before realizing he should’ve just left it in the packaging and carried it that way, and God, he’s just so tired.

He almost trips over Chris, who’s sitting halfway down the stairs. Scott bites back an irritated growl and stuffs the blanket out of the way, and then puffs out a sigh as Chris, having hopped back to a wary crouch, stares down at him from the second-highest step, eyes glowing ice-blue in the darkness.

“Would you like to give me a hand?” Scott finally says.

Chris snorts, then shifts around so he can put out his arm. He takes the blanket from Scott and wads it up as Scott makes sure the trailing edge doesn’t catch anything else. “So what’d my family do to you?”

Scott stops. Then he shakes his head, and just yanks the rest of the blanket up. He hears a box grate, but it just wobbles, it doesn’t tip and fall, so he goes on up the stairs, gathering up the blanket as he goes.

“What?” Chris says. His tone’s harsh but he’s tentative about moving, shifting as if he’ll let go of the blanket before he abruptly pulls it from Scott and then swings up through the doorway. He skitters back a couple feet, then follows Scott into the kitchen. “They did something. You’re always looking at me like you don’t know whether to kick me out or apologize.”

“It wasn’t you,” Scott says automatically. He should be nicer, he thinks. Time-travel’s weird, and even now, he’s pretty bad at understanding it, which is why he usually leaves explaining the details to Stiles or Lydia. And, well, Gerard seems to be hitting the openly sadistic period a lot earlier this time around. Older versions of Chris had told them that Gerard had just given him bad feelings, but never anything to outright act on.

This Chris doesn’t really bother hiding his feelings either. “Save me the time-travel spiel and just spit it out,” he says. “It’s driving me crazy, and if I have to share—”

“Look, you’re already getting your info on what we’ve done about your father from Stiles, so what do you want from me?” Scott snaps. He jams the folded-up blanket packaging into the wastebasket, then shoves the basket back under the sink. He’s just so worn-out and frustrated that he slaps the cabinet door too.

He catches himself and catches it before it breaks itself shutting and wakes up everybody in the house, but he can’t help glaring at Chris. Who looks almost sorry for a second, sorry and surprised and taken aback. But maybe that’s just the dark, and the fact that Chris can’t seem to turn off his eye-glow, because Chris doesn’t leave or anything like that.

Scott needs to sleep, but he doesn’t really want to go upstairs, not now, so he turns in place and then goes to the fridge. He’s not hungry either but he sees the deli packages and grabs some tomatoes and onions too, and he just starts making sandwiches. If he still doesn’t want to eat one when he’s worked through them all, well, they’ll just have lunch ready to go for tomorrow.

“I just want to know what they did,” Chris says, soft and tense. He edges up to the other end of the counter, absently stuffing the blanket with one hand as it keeps slipping out from under his arm. “Just—if they did something to you, personally. Stiles told me a lot of stories, but he always—he makes it sound just like some kind of mission, like you all went in, took care of things, moved on. And that can’t be it.”

“Look, I don’t know how I’ve been acting around you, but it’s not you, all right?” Scott says wearily, cutting up a baguette. 

“I know it’s not me. And it’s not even my father here. But it can’t just be that…” Chris cuts himself off, though a little noise that sounds like the start of a bitter laugh slips out of him “…I don’t care how many times you’ve done this, you can’t just separate it out like that in your head. I can’t see how you could. It’s not like you’re going in and out of a movie theater. You’re actually living it, and…”

“It’s not like I’m going to accidentally shoot you because I think you’re another you,” Scott says.

Chris’ foot scuffs a little. “So you didn’t like me. At some point.”

“I just—it wasn’t—” The knife veers and Scott pulls back too late, when the baguette’s already mangled. He stares at the loaf, then puts down the knife and grabs the edge of the counter and rolls at his shoulders. He hasn’t even done anything except run around, but the muscles there are all tight and achy. “Fine. I dated your daughter, and you didn’t like that because she didn’t know about werewolves or hunting or _anything_ , and you tried to break us up and then other stuff happened and you stopped trying to break us up but we broke up anyway, and at the end of the day everybody died so it was pointless.”

Scott takes a few breaths, then picks up the knife again. He doesn’t want to waste food so he cubes the messed-up end of the loaf and puts it aside for croutons, and then he switches to another knife to do the tomatoes and onions. Cuts those up and puts the tomato slices on paper towels to drain, and then goes back to the fridge to get out mayo and mustard.

“I can’t even picture a world where I feel safe enough to have children,” Chris says, suddenly but quietly. He’s still standing at the end of the counter; Scott semi-forgot about him and Scott starts and then Chris starts. Then he settles down, though he puts his hand up on the counter and his claws are out. “Unless—was she an accident?”

“I have no idea. I—it’s a weird question to ask, isn’t it? And anyway, you didn’t like me till…well, we got along a little better after she died, but I think that was more—more you needed something to do. And we always had stuff we had to do, trying to keep down who got hurt.” Scott finds the mustard but doesn’t see any mayo. He makes a note of that on the shopping list pinned to the fridge and just goes with mustard. “You were married, if that helps.”

Chris snorts. “Not really. Gerard’s such a loose cannon that the other families were already avoiding us, and I can’t picture me bringing in somebody who’s not from a hunter background. I don’t even—I have a hard time just understanding why I’d be stupid enough to not tell my kid, especially if she’s a daughter.”

“You were just trying to protect her,” Scott says. “I got that. It’s not—it’s not like I didn’t understand what you were trying to do, even if I didn’t agree with it. So it’s not that your family did anything to me.”

“So Gerard never came up?” Chris says dryly.

Scott grimaces. “Okay. He—but I don’t know if he even counts. He married in, and he—I don’t know about here, but I don’t think any of the other versions we’ve met believed in the Argent code. Ever.”

“Well, that’s not different,” Chris mutters. He sounds a little odd, even with the rage and grief lacing his tone. He pauses, then takes a deep breath. “You know, he’ll say we broke Code first. I…the werewolf who bit me, he was my best friend. We were—we were hunting together three years ago and he got bit and I should’ve shot him but I just—I didn’t. I told him to just get out of my sight and never let me hear about him ever again, and then I went back and told everybody I _had_ shot him and buried him.”

Mustard layers on both pieces of bread, as thin as possible since there’s no mayo to cut it. Meat on the bottom, onions, cheese, tomatoes, and…Scott forgot the lettuce. He goes back to the fridge to get it. “He came back?”

“Yeah, and he was an alpha too. Guess being a werewolf suited him,” Chris says. “He was telling me I should join up too, and I was trying to make him go, and it got out of hand. And then my mother found me, and…”

Chris trails off as his voice abruptly roughens. Scott looks over and the other man’s got his head down, one hand hooked around the back of his neck, just the side of his twisted mouth visible. The blanket’s spilled out from under his other arm to almost touch the floor. Scott doesn’t want to poke, but sometimes it’s better to pop a blister and he’s just getting that same feeling off Chris, a horrible swelling of trapped things that are going to come out one way or the other.

“Your mother was the leader. That means she had the right to change the Code, if she thought that it wasn’t not working for you anymore,” Scott says, closing the fridge. He watches Chris jump and snap up his head, staring wildly at Scott, and then duck again, cursing softly as he bunches up the blanket again. “At least, that’s how it worked be—”

“Yeah, it’s the same here, and when she died Kate should’ve—Kate _said_ the old rule should apply, she was even offering to shoot me herself,” Chris says, back to vicious mutterings. “Actually, I think that’s what made up Gerard’s mind about her. She was saying she’d take responsibility for it even if she was only f—and my father realized he wasn’t ever going to get control if he let that happen.”

Scott hesitates, then puts the lettuce head on the counter and goes over to Chris. He pauses when Chris stiffens, then takes one more step, nice and slow and in full view of the other man. That puts them close enough so that he could put his hand up onto Chris’ shoulder, but he thinks Chris might bolt if he does that.

“Look, whatever we ended up doing to your family in other timelines, it doesn’t mean anything about this one,” Scott says. He thinks he sees Chris gearing up for another sarcastic comment and lifts his hand, but just to ask the man to wait and hear him out. “We can’t help feeling things about what we’ve seen before, all right? We’re human, and I know we come off a little cynical but we always end up caring and—anyway, what I’m trying to say is, I don’t think you deserved what’s happened to you. This isn’t like karma, the other versions don’t pay it forward—I don’t even think that’s what karma is.”

Chris does snort, but it’s actually closer to amusement than irritation. “Because that’s not how karma’s defined.”

“Okay, well, I’m just—” Scott says, wishing once again he had Stiles’ gift for explaining abstractions.

“I just want to know, how do you people do it?” Chris suddenly says, and his voice is so rough he’s barely understandable. His eyes are glittering in the dark, not from werewolf powers but from tears. “I remind you of things, people, and I can tell but you still—you really do mean it when you say you’re just trying to deal with what’s in front of you. I’ve got to kill my father and—he’s done so much but he’s still my goddamned _father_. How do you do it?”

“I…oh, you mean…look, it’s just—it’s not like it’s easy,” Scott fumbles. “We just try—just—honestly, Stiles or Lydia is better for this. I’m sorry, I just—I sound like an asshole, I know, but I just—you just—I just remember I’m doing this because I _care_ , because no matter what they do, they’re not going to take that from me. Killing doesn’t make me like them. Thinking like them makes me like them, and as long as I don’t do that—as long as I remember who I am, that’s…that’s it. I’m sorry, that’s probably not—”

Chris kisses him. It’s not an accident. The blanket drops over their feet and Scott gets tangled in it, yelping and trying to step back but stumbling forward instead, and Chris’ hands are twisting up in the shoulders of his shirt and the man is pressing into him, desperate and raw and refusing to let go even when Scott pushes at him.

Scott’s trying to tell him to stop, and Chris’ tongue darts into his mouth, warm, almost shy, before it disappears and Chris hikes them over to the side, towards the counter. The blanket slips under Scott’s feet and Scott forces one hand off Chris to catch the counter, steadying himself. Then he twists around, shoving Chris into the edge, and once he’s got that leverage he can push his other arm up between them and force them apart.

“Goddamn it,” Chris hisses, canting himself after Scott.

Scott snarls at him out of sheer lack of ideas of what else to do, and Chris cringes, his shoulders pulling in and down, his head tilting to bare his throat. Then Chris—just dives into that, letting his head drop till his forehead’s grinding into Scott’s shoulder. He whines and arches his throat up at Scott, and when Scott grabs his arms and shoves him back into the counter, he struggles so much that Scott ends up popping claws and scratching him.

They both freeze as the smell of blood fills the air. Then Chris tries again to get up into Scott’s space, drops of blood flicking off his arms and onto his bare back, and Scott just gives up and growls Chris into stopping.

“I’m not my future daughter but I’m here,” Chris hisses. “You’ve looked like that, too, like you miss somebody.”

“That is—that is—” Scott shakes his head “—you’re—Chris, you’re not—you just lost family, and what’s left is Gerard, of all people, and on top of that you’re new-turned without an alpha and I’m the nicest one nearby, okay? That’s not a good situation.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Chris snaps. “I know, you idiot, I just—I just want to stop feeling for one damn second like I’m falling. I _have_ to kill my father, I have to, and I can’t—I know I can’t do it like this. I need to—”

Scott growls again, catching that flex in Chris’ body, and Chris stills, then raises his head. He’s got anger and fear and nerves and lust all mixed up in his eyes, and in his scent, and on top of all of that, he’s just drenched in longing, in that terrible clawing need for pack. Even the most well-balanced omega can’t keep that out of their scent, and he’s covered in it, so thick it’s a second skin, and Scott barely stops himself from—his head dips and Chris lifts his chin in anticipation, but Scott stops himself, just short of peeling his lips back and baring his teeth for a bite.

“You don’t want me,” Scott says. “You’re just looking for red eyes and a body. And if you want to talk about getting things mixed up—look, we’re gonna help. We’re gonna get your father. But this isn’t getting your father, this is pack, and you need to figure that out before you ask for things. And you know what? You figure that out, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with Gerard either.”

Then he shoves off Chris. He goes back to making sandwiches. He has lettuce now, so mustard on the bread, keep it thin, meat on the bottom, onions, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, top bread.

Chris stands where he is, breathing hard. He makes a couple noises, frustrated and near-challenging, and then he abruptly stalks off. He doesn’t take the blanket with him. Scott keeps making sandwiches.

Eventually those run out, and Scott sticks them on a plate and plastic-wraps them and puts them in the fridge. He picks up the blanket and walks out and goes upstairs, where the door to his and Chris’ room is shut. Scott tosses the blanket at it and it mostly lands in place. It could be neater, but…he turns away, after a moment’s staring, and goes up to Stiles and Lydia’s room and knocks quietly.

Lydia opens the door after a few seconds, looking sleepy. “Who died?”

“Nobody, I just…can I come in?” Scott says.

She frowns but she moves aside, then follows him back to the bed. She pauses at the edge to take off her robe, while Scott goes ahead and climbs up to the middle of the headboard. He accidentally bumps Stiles, who grunts and then squints up as Scott settles himself into a sitting position.

“No roof?” Stiles says.

Scott shrugs.

Stiles looks at him for another side, and then hikes further up the pillow till his head’s resting against Scott’s hip. Lydia gets into bed and lies down in a mirroring position, her hand slowly drifting over Scott’s foot as she falls back asleep. And Scott looks at them, and he folds his arms over his knees and puts his head on top of that, and sighs.

* * *

Talia and Stiles are making a grocery run when Stiles checks his phone, makes a face, and then redirects them from the bakery counter. “I’ll tell Scott to pick up the cake on his way home from the preserve,” he says under his breath. “The vet’s back in town, we gotta hurry.”

“Right,” Talia says, eyeing a vaguely familiar housewife who’s been staring after them for the past two minutes. “Laura and Derek have been so worried about their puppy, we need to get an appointment immediately.”

Stiles does not make a comment about that, either smart-aleck or pragmatic, but just speedwalks them through check-out and into the parking lot. Then he drives home as quickly as possible. They arrive just as Peter’s bringing the kids down from their afternoon nap; Peter takes one look at them, then hustles the kids into the living room and turns on the TV. Then he drifts back into the hall where he can both keep an eye on the kids and listen in on the conversation.

Deaton’s sitting with Chris and Lydia at the kitchen table, with a map, cups of coffee and an open medical kit in front of them. He has a bruised, swollen eye, and is rewrapping what looks like a splint on one of his fingers. Otherwise he seems fine; Talia doesn’t smell any internal injuries.

Still, her gut is twisting up, and it’s not out of any real concern for Deaton. She wouldn’t say that they all like each other much better—well, most of them, she amends, catching the casual way Stiles points out Peter’s bedhead and Peter’s uncharacteristically subdued response—but they’ve inevitably gotten used to each other. Honestly, they’ve even got routines at this point. And it’s…it’s not nice, that’s completely the wrong word for it, but it’s stable, and predictable, and God knows that after so much turbulence, she and her family needed that.

But that’s over, she knows, even before Deaton sees her and winces. “Gerard Argent’s a day away,” he says. He hesitates as Chris shifts, but Talia waves him on and he straightens up. “He’s lost most of his men, but I’d say he still has five or six of them with him.”

“One of them what happened to your face?” Stiles asks.

“The other hunter families have agreed to stay out of it, but that means they also don’t want anyone interfering. I’m under the impression that they won’t retaliate for his death so long as it appears that it’s a fair fight,” Deaton says.

“Fair?” Talia nearly spits out. “Teeth and fangs against men who carry semiautomatics?”

“Were we going that old-school?” Stiles says, looking from Talia to Lydia.

Who, surprisingly, doesn’t look as if she approves of Stiles’ interruption. She looks at Talia, and when Talia gives her a half-sarcastic nod, she gives her head a slow shake. “His entourage, definitely not. Scott and Stiles and I should be able to peel them off, possibly before they even get much into town.”

“Give me your map, I’ll show you how he’s probably going to send them in,” Chris says. Then he glances at Deaton. “Do you have any idea which ones stayed with him?”

“Actually, I did manage to confirm that all the long-term hunters have left, mostly to join other families,” Deaton says. “He’s relying on mercenaries.”

Stiles pricks alert. “You got ID or anything? We finally have some decent black-market connections, I can start checking.”

“In a day?” Peter mutters.

“Twenty-four hours is a lot of time if you know how to use it,” Stiles says cheerfully, pulling the shopping list pad off the fridge and handing it to Deaton with a pencil. “If you don’t have names, distinguishing characteristics, even just what weapons they were carrying, if you got close enough and know those.”

Deaton looks a little unnerved, but he says something or the other about seeing what he can remember. He starts writing as he talks. “Gerard’s been cut off from the druids and mages as well, but I believe his family had a decent stockpile.”

“Yeah. I couldn’t destroy anything before I got out of there,” Chris says, looking and smelling disgusted with himself. Lydia shifts the map in front of him and he blinks hard, then bends back over it. “Still, he can only carry so much.”

“Our experience is that he personally prefers magic to weapons,” Lydia says. “On the other hand, when we’ve known him, he’s been a lot older, and also had serious health issues.”

“He’s like that even when he doesn’t have those excuses,” Chris says, looking up again. He catches Talia’s eye and then holds her gaze. “You said I get a shot at him.”

“And we’ll give you one, but you still have to take it,” Talia tells him firmly. “As alpha, I can’t afford to miss.”

Chris smiles. His lips aren’t completely together and the show of teeth is bordering on insolent—Peter growls a little, drifting closer to Talia, and then sighs and turns to tell Laura to give Derek back the pillow—but they close as Talia smiles back, her teeth fully bared. Then his eyes flick to the side before he nods.

“Yeah, fine,” he says, as footsteps come to the back door.

Scott rattles in a few seconds later, turning awkwardly to hide the bag with the bakery logo on it that’s dangling from his arm. He stops when Peter rolls his eyes, and just hurries to put that into the fridge before facing the rest of them. “I think I’m pretty caught up, Stiles was live-tweet—er, texting me,” he says. “Where are we meeting him?”

And suddenly Talia feels the whole weight of things falling onto her shoulders. It’s not that she won’t willingly bear it for the sake of her pack, but…she hasn’t done anything like this in years, and even then, her father was still in charge. And that had been dealing with lesser threats, the occasional rogue hunter or crazed omega. Even if he’s cut off from his resources, Gerard Argent is still the acting head of one of the great hunter families.

He still doesn’t have _pack_ , she reminds herself savagely. That’s the werewolf’s strength, and that’s something that even the greatest of hunters haven’t managed to crush. “We—”

“Ah.” Deaton winces even as he clears his throat. “Sorry. It’s just…I may have managed to get a meeting with Gerard, under the excuse that I was fleeing Beacon Hills because I disagreed with what was going on here.”

“Talia taking in Chris?” Lydia immediately says. When Deaton nods, she sits back, expectant.

“Anyway,” Deaton says, taking a deep breath. He’s obviously straining under the combined intensity of Talia’s and Chris’ baleful stares, but Talia grudgingly gives him credit with continuing. “I know this was outside of my instructions, but I thought it might be worth the risk, and if he didn’t believe me, it’s no cost of any of you.”

Scott looks as if he disagrees, but Stiles slings an arm over his shoulders and he wisely keeps his mouth shut.

“He informed me that he knew about the death of your parents. I think he’s under the impression that you’re desperate for numbers ahead of a confrontation with the rest of your family, and that’s why you agreed to take Chris,” Deaton says. “He doesn’t think that’s going to help you much.”

“Well, what does he care what helps us?” Peter says.

Talia glances at him and Peter ducks his head, but keeps his eyes fixed on Deaton. She moves over and puts her hand on Peter’s shoulder, letting him know she won’t object but he needs to keep the interjections to a minimum.

“He does understand that he’s at a disadvantage—he ranted quite a bit about how the other families are taking the opportunity to raid his family of men and resources,” Deaton says, over Chris’ snort. “So he’s willing to make a bargain, at least for the short term. If you turn Chris over to him, he’ll withdraw and, in his words, you’ll both see to your own attics before looking in each other’s.”

“Didn’t we always love those folksy expressions?” Stiles drawls, just before Lydia pivots in her chair, stomps his foot, and swings back without so much as a twitch of the mouth.

“He’s lying,” Chris says at the same time, looking at Talia. “He just wants to get us together and take us both out.”

“I know,” Talia says. “Though where was he thinking?”

Peter twists under her hand, and she can hear him swallow hard, but he keeps silent. Chris gets further along an objection before his sense overrides his anger and he picks up on where Talia is going with this. As for the time travelers, they all look varying degrees of unsurprised, from Scott’s resignation to Lydia’s impatience at their slowness.

“He said there’s a distillery outside of town which is owned by a neutral, a half-fae,” Deaton says.

“Nix,” Stiles immediately says. “Look, sorry about your pride, but that place has too many pipes even when it’s abandoned. It’s too hard to cover off on.”

“Noted,” is all Talia says. She doesn’t quite follow what Stiles means, but he’s too in earnest to be discounted, and anyway, right now she can’t afford pride. “When my parents dealt with hunters before, they usually met at the crossroads off County Road Thirteen and the old cemetery.”

Peter shifts again. “That’s fine for talks, but that area has all those tunnels running underneath, remember?” he hisses. “From the old water plant that used to be nearby?”

“Oh, right, no, that’s—he’d find those,” Talia says.

“He would,” Chris agrees.

Deaton clears his throat again. “I don’t think he’s going to want to negotiate the place. He seemed very confident that you’d be the…well, the weaker party.”

Talia instinctively bares her teeth, but she’s not really registering the insult. She doesn’t have the time; they need a plan in place now. “What if we stayed outside of the distillery?” she says. “It’s well away from town, we won’t need to worry about interference from anyone else. And it’s good ground otherwise, elevated. All clear around the building, but it’s not that hard to get into the preserve from there.”

“Then you won’t be able to even pretend you’ll be talking to him,” Lydia says. “He’ll try to be there first, so you’ll have to beat him to it, and just ambush him as he comes up.”

“Well, would that be a problem?” Talia says. “Peter’s had his last day of the semester, and you said you could deal with Gerard’s men before he gets into town.”

“Yeah, actually, if he’s coming in for the distillery, that’d make it easier,” Stiles says. He’s abandoned Scott and come over to the table to divide his attention between the map Chris is marking up and the notes Deaton is making whenever he isn’t speaking. “I can take the interstate exit, and Scott can cover the two county roads.”

“But like you said, it’s by the preserve,” Lydia points out. When they all look confused, she huffs in irritation. “The monster. We dropped that for a while, but just because it sticks to the preserve.”

“I thought you said you can ward it off?” Talia says. A touch sharper than Lydia deserves, even if the woman gets on Talia’s nerves. It’s a good reminder and Talia is kicking herself for having forgotten.

Lydia levels a contemptuous look at her. “Yes, we can. But we don’t have time to lay down thorough wards at the distillery, Stiles will be on the other side of town, and _I_ will be on babysitting duty, so the wards _here_ don’t break.”

And of course, right then Laura’s voice pipes up. “I don’t need a babysitter,” she says from just behind Peter’s legs. “Mom, Mom, I’m old enough, I—”

Talia tries not to develop an instant migraine. “Laura, _no_ ,” she says, and then she sucks in a breath and tries to sound more conciliatory as she turns. She bends down and puts her hands on Laura’s shoulders. “Laura, you have a very important job here, you—”

“But I’m an _alpha_ ,” Laura says, stomping her foot. She glowers up at Talia. “You’re always telling me that alphas are the protectors, so I want to help! We always have to hide and I’m tired of hiding, Mom!”

“You can stop hiding when you’re too big to fit in the holes,” Peter mutters.

“You’re mean.” Laura looks at Peter, then shifts her gaze to his leg. Then she kicks him, and when he yelps and stumbles back, she sticks her tongue out at him. “Mom, Mom, Peter’s going and he’s not even an alpha—”

“Do _not_ say that,” Talia snaps. She jerks Laura till the girl looks at her, a little frightened. Which makes Talia feel guilty, but she—she doesn’t have the time to do this properly, she never does, and she just has to do it so the important things get across. “Never say that again, Laura. Alphas and betas are all pack, you understand? Pack doesn’t work without both. And Peter’s going because—because he’s not as good as you with Derek and Cora. You’ve got to protect them too. Aren’t they pack?”

Laura hesitates. She’s a smart girl and she has good instincts and she can sense when she’s being hustled, but she’s still too young to know how to stick with that. So she nods, slowly and reluctantly. “But Mom—”

“But watching them is important when Peter and I can’t be there,” Talia says. She pauses, wondering how much she should push it, and then decides that, unfortunately, Laura is old enough for a few truths. “If Peter and I don’t come back, _you_ are alpha and you have to be there for your brother and sister. You understand me?”

Her daughter’s eyes widen, then suddenly brim with tears as she reaches up and grabs at Talia’s arms. “Mom. You can’t go. Dad—what if Dad comes back?”

“ _We’re_ coming back,” Peter says. He’s irritated and a little careless, but he squats down so he can look Laura in the eye. “I promised your mom, okay? I’m always coming back, and I might be mean, but you’ll just have to put up with me.”

Laura sniffles a little, but incredibly, she actually seems to be comforted by that. And then she suddenly pushes out of Talia’s grip, steps back, and looks at both of them with watering eyes. “I don’t want either of you to go,” she says, just before turning and fleeing into the other room.

Talia takes a step after her, then presses her hand to her face, wishing she just had the damn time to sit with her children. Then something brushes by her and she looks up to see a slightly embarrassed Peter edging towards the living room.

“If somebody doesn’t, she’ll start Cora crying,” he mutters.

“Ah,” says Deaton, interrupting Talia’s smile at Peter. When they both turn back to the kitchen, he looks very uncomfortable about interrupting, but he raises his hand with the splinted finger. “Listen. You don’t want an Emissary. Fine. I’m not your Emissary. But I’m a druid, and as long as someone explains which wards you need, I believe I can handle it.”

He just keeps trying. Raw and clearly out of his depth, but Deaton is so stubborn that Talia’s actually beginning to admire it. Just a little, but she is.

“I hate to say it, but that’s not a bad idea,” Peter says, looking at Talia.

“Make him swear a blood oath first,” Chris suddenly says. And raises his brows when Talia looks at him. “I said I’d protect your family. Well, if he’s talked to my father, then you need to make sure of him. It doesn’t matter how well you know him, or what he’s done for you before, you need to make sure.”

Deaton blinks, then shrugs. “I have no problem with that,” he says. “Whatever will let me help you.”

Talia weighs it all up. It’s risky, but after all, Peter had managed to keep off the monster for a few days with just some improvisation and luck. He isn’t good enough with magic yet to repeat that, or to handle the complexity of the wards that Stiles and Lydia can, but he should know enough to keep an eye on what Deaton is doing. And Talia does think she’d rather have Deaton close at hand, rather than swap him with Stiles and have him working where none of them can see him.

“All right,” she says. “That’s what we’ll do.”


	6. Chapter 6

Once they have a plan, things swing into motion immediately—and by immediately, Lydia means that Scott runs himself through a shower and packs a duffel bag of supplies, and heads out the door barely an hour after Deaton’s arrival. They still need to narrow down Gerard’s possible approaches, but Scott wants an early start on setting up a perimeter and that’s both a strategic and a mental issue. He needs time to get himself ready for fighting to kill.

“He’s going to be up almost thirty-six hours straight,” Chris mutters.

“He’s a werewolf,” Lydia says, eyeing Chris.

Chris ignores her and for the rest of the research session, acts as if the incident never happened. Something went down with him and Scott and neither of them have explained it, aside from Scott’s muttered warning that Chris was having pack-separation issues the morning after Scott spent the night in her and Stiles’ room. And sometimes Lydia honest-to-God wishes she was oblivious to such things, because it would go a long way towards streamlining her endless list of follow-up items.

Stiles helps with research till Deaton’s had a rest and can do the blood oath. Then he takes a quick nap, checks where they are when he’s up, and decides he’s got enough to intercept his assigned hunters. He packs to head out, to the accompaniment of Peter pestering him for last-minute details of the magic that Deaton will have to manage out by the distillery. Which is an acceptable reason, but it gets a little bit ridiculous when Peter veers into asking Stiles whether he needs to return Stiles’ book if things go wrong, and Stiles makes a joke about overreaching and birthdays.

Talia thinks so as well, judging from how she slips in to catch Peter once Stiles’ car is pulling down the driveway.

“I don’t think I told you to lead him on,” Talia says. She’s not quite joking.

She and Peter are standing in the laundry room, which branches off just inside the garage door. They haven’t shut the door all the way and while Lydia doesn’t have werewolf hearing, she has cultivated her banshee powers enough that she’s certainly better than the average human.

Peter scuffs his feet. “Well, you weren’t exactly giving detailed instructions either,” he mutters. “Look, you know I’m doing it to get—”

“I do know, but do you actually like him, too?” Talia says. 

“What?” Peter says, sharply enough that Lydia doesn’t have to try to hear him. Then his voice drops, but it’s still distinctly offended. “No. He’s just trying to make me like him, so we’ll stop caring when they walk all over us, and I’m not stupid, Talia, I know he’s doing it and I haven’t forgotten what assholes they were when they first showed up.”

“They were?” Talia says. Very much amused now, even if she still sounds worried.

“Are. Whatever. Anyway, is this really the time?” Peter says. He’s starting to sound harried as well as defensive. “I need to get this load done—shut up, they finally got me a pair of jeans I like, and I’m not wasting it on Gerard Argent. And isn’t it Cora’s feeding time?”

Talia makes a muffled noise. It’s too faint for Lydia to detect the emotion, but she’d guess it’s exasperated from what Talia says next. “I hate to admit it, but I’m wishing we’d kept Scott back to do that. I just went in and Laura must have said something, because Derek won’t say anything to me but ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and he’s looking at me with these…these…I had to leave. He just looks so—so terrified, Peter. God. I am a horrible mom.”

“You’re not,” Peter says tentatively. He clears his throat, but that doesn’t make him sound any more comfortable. “It’s just—it’s what we have to do. And we’re werewolves, and Hales, and it’s just…it’s just what our family gets, with our reputation.”

“But I wanted better for them, damn it. That’s why I even fell for Mark in the first—that son of a bitch.” Talia’s silent for a moment. “Listen, Peter—”

“I’m glad you’re taking me,” Peter says, rushed and urgent. “I know I’ve never killed anybody, but I’m—I’ll hold up my end, I promise.”

Talia sighs. “Peter, I wasn’t changing my mind and telling you to stay back. Look, honestly, I’d like to do that, but I’m not going out there with just Chris Argent and Deaton. And—let me finish. I don’t want to use you as a shield, but—”

“You’re not,” Peter says vehemently. He pauses, and then goes on more quietly, but no less firmly. “I’m not a kid. I don’t have blue eyes but I’ve seen just as much, if not more, as people who do. I know what I’m getting into, Talia. And—and I’m your brother, and pack, and if you don’t let me back you up, neither of those mean anything.”

“I know. And I’m glad I have you,” Talia says. She sounds tight, her voice heavy as lead, and Peter makes a stifled, short purring noise. “Still, doesn’t mean I can’t wish you were safe with my kids. And…look, what I told Laura, that goes for you too. If I go down—I’m not planning on it, but if you want to back me up properly, _you_ have to. You understand, Peter? If I go down—”

“—I’ll come back here and get them,” Peter says, so quietly Lydia leans forward and still barely can hear him. “I know. I prom—alpha, I promise.”

“Oh, Peter,” Talia sighs. Their feet scuffle some more, and Peter whimpers a little, and then Talia’s purr, the lower, more resonant alpha purr, echoes into the kitchen.

It goes on for a couple minutes, lingering even when the dryer suddenly lurches on. Then Talia comes out of the laundry room. She walks into the kitchen and comes to stand at the opposite side of the table from Lydia, who’s long since gone back to searching firearms registration databases.

“I take it this is the talk where you warn me that your children are the most precious thing on earth and that if I let anything happen to them, I’ll regret it?” Lydia says.

Talia snorts, and then actually pulls out the chair next to Lydia and takes a seat. “You say that as if this has happened before. I thought I was dead.”

Lydia lifts her head and gives the other woman a good, long, considering look. She’s noticed that Talia becomes a different person when she’s driven up against a wall—no, not a different person. Still the same elements, but they come together like pieces of a fine suit of armor, supple and flexible but impenetrable at the same time.

“I still don’t like your attitude, or your approach, but at this point, I accept that you’re here to intervene for my family,” Talia says. “We just might disagree on what that means.”

“And I thought we’d taken steps to improve that,” Lydia says dryly. “Or is there another reason why I do daily recaps?”

Talia presses her lips together, a sign that she’s starting to get ruffled. Then she shifts back in her chair and watches Lydia working for a few minutes. Peter comes out of the laundry room, looks curiously at them, and then shrugs and gets Cora’s food from the fridge. He shrugs again as Talia mouths a thank-you at him, then goes upstairs.

“I wanted to talk to you about worst outcomes,” Talia finally says. She obviously likes this subject even less than when she’d been discussing it with Peter, making a visible effort to drag out each word. Even then, the words stretch like taffy before dropping from her mouth. “I know I’m putting that in your hands too.”

“Well, worst outcomes don’t happen when we’re here,” Lydia snaps.

Talia’s brows rise. “You’re very sure of yourself on that.”

“I’m sure because I’ve failed enough times to know when I’m doing that, and when I’m not,” Lydia says. She sees the flicker of surprise on Talia’s face and pushes her laptop away for a moment, looking directly at the other woman. “We may seem arrogant, but believe me, everything we say and do, we’ve had to test. When I say we’ve failed, I don’t mean we just forgot the house keys.”

“You did say you always stay till the bodies are buried,” Talia says slowly. Her antagonism’s faded a little, to be replaced with wariness and curiosity and just the faintest trace of discomfort. She tilts her head and her eyes almost slide away before narrowing at Lydia. “Does time travel slow the aging process?”

Lydia rolls her eyes. “If it did, I wouldn’t spend nearly so much on cosmetics, would I?”

“I think it’s a waste for you either way. But then that means you’re never around for long, doesn’t it?” Talia says.

If she’d been hoping to throw Lydia off with the underhanded compliment, well, Lydia’s been dealing with Stiles’ methods of flattery for years. “No, but then, it doesn’t really take that long to end the world,” Lydia says. A flicker catches her eye and she looks back at her computer, only to find that it’s gone to screensaver on her. “Anyway, when we were jumping—the when of when we were jumping into, it was always near a critical point, so there’s very little margin for error. Which is—”

“—why you decided to jump even further back, and see if you had more lead time that way.” Talia leans back in her seat and watches as Lydia irritably mistypes, then retypes her password. “Well, then I’m curious why you’d be so thorough about that, and then, once you’re here, you’re suddenly taking a step back.”

Lydia starts to ask what the woman is talking about, and then she notices the way Talia’s holding herself, intent and poised, a predator’s crouch even if the woman’s body is physically arranged in a slouch. She closes her mouth and checks that all of her files are up-to-date, then saves them and puts the laptop properly to sleep. Then she looks at Talia.

The woman might improve under pressure, but she’s still irritatingly impatient for an alpha. “You people have gone on and on about how you’re here to save me and my family, and then when we’re having our big confrontation, none of you are insisting on being there in person?” Talia says. “I don’t believe it. Something’s up.”

“Well, if it is, is it always in your best interest to know?” Lydia says after a moment. “One of your biggest advantages is the fact that _Gerard_ has no idea what Stiles and Scott and I are like. Even if he’s heard of us, all he knows is that we’re a banshee, a mage, and an alpha werewolf.”

“You’re sure he hasn’t heard about the time travel?” Talia says skeptically. “Much as I hate to admit it, Argent was on the right track with the blood oath. We probably should’ve had Deaton swear to it earlier.”

“No, we shouldn’t, because people can tell Deaton is oathbound even if they can’t make him talk, and marking him out as special before just would’ve given us another person to look after. Anyway, even if Gerard has heard about the time travel,” Lydia says, with deliberate slowness. “All he knows is that we’re a banshee, a mage, and an alpha werewolf. He thinks he knows what those words mean— _you_ still think that, and you’ve had the privilege of watching us work for the past few weeks.”

Talia pushes up, obviously ready to take offense, and then a laugh twists out of her instead. “You’re putting me off again,” she says. “I’m short-tempered, I’ll own up to that, but I’m not a fool, Lydia. What are you—”

And suddenly Lydia is tired. She’s tired of the verbal fencing, tired of trying to juggle past and present not only for herself, but for everyone around her. Even for people they’re trying to _kill_ , for God’s sake, and all because—all because she and Stiles and Scott slipped up one time, were too shocked to have gotten out alive and too busy thinking about the people who had to die to get them out to realize what they’d really done. Sometimes, she thinks, time traveling is just so much more trouble than it ever saves.

“We’re not trying to trick you, or to go behind your back or anything like that, all right?” she says, staring straight over her laptop. “It’s just sometimes we can’t do everything ourselves. And we can’t save people by just putting them in a box—if it were that easy, believe me, we would’ve just drugged all of you and tossed you into a room while we took care of things. We have to work in whatever world we’re in, Talia. And if you look at this one, the biggest question is what surprises Gerard might send in on the side, and we have better skills for intercepting those. So it’d be a waste to send Stiles and Scott with you.”

She almost adds that after all, Gerard’s a man at the end of the day, and as long as he gets taken out before he can talk, anybody should be able to kill him. And then she suppresses a sigh and wonders, not for the first time, when she started to sound so much like Stiles.

“I think that was a compliment,” Talia says, as hesitant as she is sarcastic. Then she shifts in her chair, leaning over to look more closely at Lydia. “Or not? That’s the frustrating thing with you people, every time I start to think I understand you…”

“Oh, fine, yes, we trust that an alpha who’s lived to your age should be able to kill somebody without a lot of handholding. There’s your compliment,” Lydia says.

Talia laughs. It’s short, but surprisingly free of bitterness, and that’s what makes Lydia look sharply at her. But Talia’s shaking her head and still snickering, and the longer she goes, the more she has…she has that slightly loose edge of someone who’s amused just because they’ve been up too long, doing too much, and they’re just too tired to be anything else.

“You do trust me, trust us,” Talia says. “That’s the damnedest—even Peter, you know. It took me a while to figure it out, but all your jokes about him being evil aside—”

“Stiles hasn’t made one of those in at least a week,” Lydia mutters.

“—all the jokes aside.” Talia pauses to give Lydia a pointed look. “You jumped here blind and tracked us down, and didn’t hesitate to come down on our side as soon as you found us. And you did all that just trusting that we’ll…that we’ll be worth it, at some point. I mean—isn’t the classic time-traveler move to just go back and kill whoever might touch off the end of days before they can do it?”

“In _fiction_ , where the author can just go with whatever version of time travel they feel like,” Lydia says, and then she reins herself in because really, there’s sounding like Stiles, and there’s turning into his lesser clone. “Well, I suppose we’re just hopeful.”

“The funny thing is, I really think you are.” Talia starts to push herself out of her chair and then she turns to face Lydia again, balanced on the hand she has gripping the edge of the table. “That or desperate.”

Lydia considers the other woman and then she smiles. “That too.”

Talia’s brows twitch and her mouth thins. She doesn’t like that—oddly, she doesn’t seem to like that that’s the truth, rather than not liking Lydia for it. A flicker of sympathy, which verges far too close to pity for Lydia’s taste, goes across her face. Her lips purse and then part, and then she changes her mind about whatever she’d just been about to say and just slides out between her chair and the table.

“If you need help,” Lydia says after a second.

“Yes?” Talia says archly, already halfway around the table.

Lydia is not going to fail just because of her injured pride, she’s not making that mistake again, but at the same time—Talia can just be so _close_ to admirable, and then she’s just as petty as her brother. So Lydia just raises her brows.

Amusement and irritation mix across Talia’s face. It looks like irritation wins, since Talia abruptly twists towards the hall, but then the woman stops again. “Well, if Scott or Stiles finish early, they’re welcome to come help get rid of the body,” Talia says over her shoulder. “But I expect you to stay with the children till we’re all back.”

“Of course,” Lydia says. She almost glances away, because Talia is, but then Talia hesitates, her gaze staying on Lydia. And Lydia doesn’t like being pitied, but…she has to admit, it’s been a long, long time since anybody besides Stiles or Scott even cared whether she’s been hurt. “I hope you realize I’m not staying home because I can’t fight.”

“No, I know you’re doing it because you’ll cause the most damage if that man is fool enough to come at my children,” Talia says, her mouth twisting wryly. “And everything else aside, I do appreciate that.”

“Yes, well…” Lydia waves her hand and pulls her laptop towards her again “…we’ll be here. Good luck.”

Talia’s turned around and is halfway through a step forward. Her foot doesn’t come down when it should, but is a beat late. Then she shakes herself and keeps going, and doesn’t stop again. Lydia flips up her laptop and goes back to work.

* * *

Waiting for Gerard Argent to show up is boring. And frustrating. And Peter regrets a little bit that he gets to manage the cellphone—since Deaton is concentrating on magic and Talia and Chris are busy watching the road leading up to the distillery—and so he’s the one who gets to read all the texts about how Scott’s broken a hunter’s neck, or Stiles has shut down the interstate by wrecking another hunter’s car. 

He’s not a complete neophyte. He’s been on hunts with his family before, and not just ones for dinner; it’s just that he’s never been the one to make the kill. But he knows that it’s a lot of hurry up and wait, and that if you can’t deal with that, _you’re_ going to be the one all the cousins mock for getting sent home early with a wolfsbane bullet in your foot. Peter can be patient if it’s important, and about the only thing more important than showing Gerard the Hales aren’t the weaklings he thinks they are is showing whoever killed Peter’s and Talia’s parents that _nobody_ goes after the Hales and lives to brag about it.

It’s just…taking forever, Peter thinks, squatting in a ditch near the distillery. Honestly, it does not take that long to drive through Beacon Hills.

“Peter?” Talia says.

“Hmm?” Peter looks up and sees her slipping down the ditch towards him. Chris is further up, hunched at the edge with the rifle he argued them into giving him. He only got two bullets with it, one to make Gerard’s car stop and the other to put through Gerard’s head, and neither of them wolfsbane, but even so, Talia never fully turns her back on him.

She’s flicking her eyes between him and Peter as she makes an annoyed noise. “Well?”

“I just checked, they said he’s still at the…” Peter pulls out the phone again to show her, and then nearly drops it as he sees it’s flashing with a new text. He’s so startled that he has to read it twice before he understands it, and then he lets out a warning bark that makes Chris look over too. “Stiles says he hit the perimeter alarm. That means he’ll be here in just a few—”

“All right, I’m going,” she says. 

Talia is silent for a moment. It’s just past the new moon and there’s barely any light from the sky, and what little there is mostly touches on her eyes and the hint of fang peeping from under her top lip. When she’s still like that, there’s not even movement to let Peter extrapolate the features of her face, and she’s more of a dark, wavering wraith than a real person.

Then she abruptly dips forward. Her hand passes over the back and side of his neck, tugging him into the quick, glancing kiss she gives his temple, and then Talia pivots. She’s only wearing a wrap and the cloth rustles as it drops, leaving behind a black wolf that noiselessly leaps the edge of the ditch. In a matter of seconds she’s across the road and further up, slipping behind a stack of packing crates they moved so that it’d be the only hiding spot between the road and the distillery itself.

Peter eels over and grabs his sister’s wrap, and then scrambles back into place. When they gave him the rifle, Chris curtly pointed out where they needed to stay in order to be out of the line of fire, and Peter fully intends to not be the one at fault if that goes wrong.

Chris sinks down into the longish grass till he’s no longer visible, and Peter can’t even catch the glint of the rifle. Deaton’s up by the distillery doors, playing decoy as well as managing the wards, and Peter can still see him—the man paces into view every other minute. The distillery’s locked up tight for the night and they added extra protections to keep anyone from getting in or out. And Talia had slipped Peter a box of bullets, telling him to toss Chris a refill if Deaton looked like he was being a problem, blood oath or not.

The minutes tick by. Peter’s starting to pick at the grass around him when he finally makes out a car engine. Except—it takes the last turn before the distillery and goes off in a different direction. He almost jerks up out of his spot because, stupidly, he thinks they’ll have to chase it, and then he remembers he has the phone and he checks it.

If Gerard was veering off, there should be an update but there isn’t any. And the glow’s just fading from the phone when Peter hears another car approaching.

“Shut it off,” comes a mutter from Chris. “I can see the glow, he might catch it.”

Peter wants to point out that they’re werewolves and Gerard isn’t, but he bites down on that and just wraps his hand around the phone’s screen and keypad. He scrunches down on his belly as the car comes up to the turn…and keeps going straight.

And suddenly it’s like Peter’s heart is in his ears, drumming like mad as he tries not to pant. His breathing sounds ridiculously loud as it is, and he shoves his free hand over his mouth to try and soften it. The car comes closer and closer, and Peter can hear Deaton suck in his breath over by the distillery; Peter remembers his other job, keeping an eye on the druid, and starts to lift his head.

Chris growls. It’s a very specific growl, the one for warning others off a kill, and it’s presumptuous as hell, whatever the man’s deal with Talia. Peter starts to—

A gunshot cracks the night wide open. Almost on top of it come the sounds of shattering glass and the wet snap of bone into flesh, and close on their heels is the screeching of a car skidding out of control. Dirt kicks up into the ditch, and then Peter can’t help a yelp as keening, wildly spinning wheels suddenly appear overhead.

He throws his arm up over his head, but the car twists away, towards the other side of the road, and then bounces over the edge and into the ditch on that side. Peter’s up just in time to see the car’s rear bumper arc up.

Three heartbeats were in that car. Now one’s fluttering in the middle of the road, while another is fleeing across the field before the distillery—only to spike and then cut off as it gets near the crates where Talia was hiding. Peter glimpses a dark knot on the ground before the crates that then falls apart into two bodies, one a standing wolf, the other a motionless figure lying on the ground.

He turns around and Chris is standing over a man who’s half-lying in the road. Peter can’t see the man’s face, but he can see Chris’, and the way it’s twisted up, almost tearing itself open in rage, tells him who the man is. Chris has the rifle raised as if he’s going to shoot the man, and then, just as the man starts to say something, Chris abruptly flips the rifle around and brings the butt-end down in a sharp, final motion against the man’s head, which breaks apart under it like a piece of pottery.

“Two,” Peter mutters. He looks around—the grass around the distillery flares with magic, but it’s protective blue—and then zeros in on the car. “I think—”

“Peter!” his sister screams.

He whips back around, seeing her shifting back to wolf mid-run, with human, panicked eyes above her muzzle, and then hears the heartbeat surging out of the car’s backseat.

Peter throws himself to the side as a huge, dark form explodes through the rear windshield, but he forgets about the stupid ditch that he’d been hiding in just a few moments ago. His foot slides down into it and he scrabbles at the dirt, then yanks himself up, only to feel claws tearing through his shoulder.

He snarl-shouts in pain, rolling away, and the—the _werewolf_ , it’s a werewolf Gerard had with him, and it comes loping after Peter, grinning, blue eyes bright as stars in the darkness. “Little Peter,” the man says. “You’re bigger since the last reunion.”

“Uncle—uncle Carlo?” Peter says, so shocked he falters in his crawling.

Carlo snarls and jumps at him. Peter jerks his arms and legs up over himself, then jerks them the other way, trying to go claws-out, but he’s too late—something hits Carlo, knocking him askew, and Peter desperately flings himself over in the other direction.

He makes it. His uncle rips through the back of his calf but Peter gets away, and then he pulls himself around to see—see Chris, standing up with his rifle held in both hands, using it to bar Carlo from sinking his fangs into Chris’ neck as a fresh gunshot wound heals up on Carlo’s right arm. Chris isn’t going to win, he’s at least three inches shorter and seriously under Carlo’s weight, but he resists long enough for Talia to barrel into Carlo from the side. 

She’s in full-shift, and then she’s in alpha form, on top as she and Carlo wrestle, and Peter heaves a sigh of relief even as Chris gets thrown out of the way and cries out, grabbing at his leg as the bone snaps. 

“Talia! Peter—Peter!” Deaton is shouting. “Chris! Get them away from—it’s pushing at the—”

Chris growls, ignoring the man as he drags himself backwards from the fighting werewolves, but Peter glances over. Deaton’s…he’s not pointing at Talia and Carlo. He’s pointing at something to the side of them, further into the woods.

Peter looks over and sees movement in the underbrush, something sliding back and forth like a caged beast just behind a line of fiercely-glowing runes. But before he can tell what it is, there’s a pained snarl and it’s _Talia_ , not Carlo.

Talia rolling back over the road, her side soaked with blood, as Carlo gets up on his hands and knees, groggily shaking his head. Their uncle is bleeding too, from half a dozen places on his chest and arms and legs, but he doesn’t look nearly weak enough. And Talia’s not leaping at him to finish the job—no, she’s scrambling back towards Peter and Chris. She smells—she smells more afraid than angry, and as she moves there’s something wrong with her side—she’s healing but Peter can see too-white patches and he suddenly realizes that’s not her skin, that’s _bone_. She’s alpha, she’s healing faster than Carlo but that doesn’t matter if he gets her deep enough.

“You asshole,” Talia’s snarling back at Carlo. “What did Peter and I ever do to you? We didn’t tell Dad to throw you out, you need to take that up with—”

“I know he’s dead,” Carlo says. He’s still on his hands and knees, but he’s got his weight shifted back, crouching rather than holding himself up. He’s going to lunge. “And you, yeah, I was okay with you but I put up with him lording it over us for too long and even if I don’t mind you personally, you’re his fucking brat, Talia. So just—”

Peter doesn’t think. He just sees Carlo’s legs tense and he knows Talia won’t get out of the way in time, and he throws himself forward and grabs her and rolls them to the side. 

She’s yelling at him, then trying to fight past him, and they get tangled up in each other. Then Talia grabs Peter by the arm and wrenches him out of the way, so hard that he thinks he feels his shoulder start to pop.

Talia lets go. He drops, pulling his arm in as the joint relaxes, just barely not dislocated, and sees her plow into Carlo just as Carlo plunges his claws deep into Chris’ thigh. 

Chris screams. Talia sinks her claws into Carlo’s back, but before she can get her fangs down into his neck, his head whips around and he bites into her forearm. Her claws rake over him, but then that hand comes off his back and Carlo throws his body to the side, coming off Chris and down onto Talia. His mouth comes up all wet with blood and then goes down—

Peter is screaming too, but he doesn’t realize it till he’s actually on Carlo’s back, frantically ripping down with his claws. He’s just trying to get Carlo off his sister, and then he sees Carlo’s nape bobbing right _there_ and he needs to—

He doesn’t reach it. Something coming from the side hits him, right on the side of the head. It’s not enough to knock him off but he gets dizzy, and then Carlo rears up. Almost gets up and stands, he’s so high, and when he drops back down, Peter falls off.

It’s all dark. Peter can’t see anything. He doesn’t understand—he can’t be knocked out or dead, he can still move his arm and he’s trying to wave the darkness out of the way as he scrabbles backward, but it’s like—it’s like a curtain and just as he thinks that, it _moves_. Not like a curtain, like a thing, like a figure that was standing between him and—Carlo has Talia on the ground again. She has her claws sunk into his chest, but Peter can tell they’re too low, they aren’t hitting things that will bleed fast enough, and Carlo has his one hand high up on Talia’s shoulder and his claws are jittering closer and closer to her throat.

His other hand’s somewhere between them and Peter’s not sure where, but Talia suddenly spits up blood and—Peter takes a step forward. Tries to, but suddenly that black thing is between them again. It’s like walking into molasses, the stuff gives and then sticks, and then as Peter’s struggling to push through it anyway, it suddenly flexes and it’s hard enough to throw him backwards on his ass.

Peter stares up at the thing, almost forgetting his sister, and it…it has a _face_. It’s the thing that kept him trapped in his own house and it rounds at the top and features start to emerge and he can tell it’s looking at him.

Then it disappears. Talia and Carlo are still fighting, and Talia’s spitting up more blood.

“I’ll let him live,” Carlo rasps. He’s starting to shake, but he’s still not weakening fast enough. “Just—just _give_ , you little bitch, and I’ll let Peter—”

“Talia!” Peter gasps, horrified, because she’s already trying to look at him.

Carlo laughs, knowing he’s won. And then he suddenly—he jerks up a foot in the air, his arms dangling comically, before being tossed aside. A panting, sweaty, windblown Scott stands over Talia in his place, so out of breath he can’t even speak. He just looks apologetic and tries to reach down and—

That shadow thing comes back, swooping at Talia like a vulture. Peter starts to cry out and Scott whips around and then he gets his claws up and slashes at it, only for the thing to part before him, black streams circling around to reform behind him. Scott’s quick to catch on and pivots, but it’s all he can do to stay between it and Talia, who’s horribly pale and not getting up on her own.

Peter takes a diving step towards his sister, but then sees something move to the side. He skews around and sees Chris, who’s just getting up, holding his thigh, and then turns further and sees Carlo where Scott threw him. Carlo’s not dead yet, and he’s got his hand out to roll over, his lips peeling back in another snarl.

One second Peter’s by his sister, and the next he’s on top of Carlo, his arm freshly laid open by Carlo’s claws, and _Carlo’s_ arm is flopping limply to the ground. His uncle’s staring up at him, eyes shining so brightly that Peter’s eyes are tearing up, looking into them, and then…they suddenly fade. Go glassy, then pale and then dull. They’re still staring but there’s nothing in them.

Peter sucks in a breath. He needs it. He’s swaying, he’s so dizzy, and when he tries to move his hand to support himself, it’s stuck. His hand is stuck. He’s got his claws in his uncle’s chest, so deep that the tips of his fingers have gone in too, and he has to kick his foot against the ground in order to get them out.

The effort makes Peter fall off Carlo and it’d be—he’d be embarrassed if he actually gave a damn, but he just. He just. He _killed_ somebody. His uncle, and—

“Shit, Peter, _move_ —” Stiles is saying.

Stiles?

Hands grab Peter under the arms and haul him away from his uncle, just as the shadow swoops over the body. It…sort of envelopes Carlo for a second, like somebody’s thrown a blanket over him, and then it lifts off and whisks into the woods, but Peter almost swears it looks more man-like, more solid.

“Stiles, get over here,” Scott snaps. “My healing can’t keep up, she’s bleeding inside—”

Peter remembers. And tumbles over himself, but he gets to his sister before Stiles does. He can’t get her away from Scott, who’s got his hands pressed to her belly, but he gets his arms around her head and shoulders and bends down and then sobs in relief when he hears her breathing. Her mouth is moving, even, she’s trying to talk—no, it’s a rattle, her throat’s making awful dying noises and Peter pulls her up closer, snarling when people try to get him off her.

“We’re trying to help, Peter, Stiles needs to—” Scott’s saying.

“Shut up and go make sure Chris doesn’t pass out,” Stiles says. “I got her now, I can work around him. And—Deaton, goddamn it, wards up! Just because that fucking thing broke them doesn’t mean they won’t hold against every other fucking thing in these woods…Peter. Peter. She’s alive, okay? I got her. Peter. _Peter_.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” is all Peter can say, as he cradles his sister. “No, no, no.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...said this before, but why werewolves with the insane reflexes don't adopt modern firearms is beyond me.
> 
> Umpteenth time, show's stance on how werewolf healing works is wildly inconsistent. So alphas seem to have better healing powers than betas, but look, if you hit the aorta on a regular human, they can bleed to death in less than a minute. I am assuming for purposes of this 'verse that if a beta can hit a spot like that on an alpha, it'll have the same effect. Also, that you can eventually wear down alpha healing if you inflict enough terrible wounds in the same short time period. And alphas may be stronger but if somebody outweighs you and is much taller than you, that's going to be a fighting disadvantage however you cut it. 
> 
> They couldn't tell it was Carlo in the car, because as psycho as Gerard Argent is, he also is an experienced hunter and he would cover up Carlo's giveaways so he can have his nasty surprise, and not have it spoiled early by werewolf super-senses or Stiles' magic-detection spells. And Stiles and Lydia and Scott don't think of this ahead of time because yeah, even canonical!Gerard will use werewolves, but he generally makes sure that he's got them paralyzed and/or is holding a loved one hostage in front of them, or otherwise makes sure they're doing it against their will. He doesn't just carpool with werewolves.


	7. Chapter 7

Stiles would like to say that they did the best they could, and covered everything they could think of, and it’s just fucking _Gerard Argent_ who would decide to give the top contender for the Hale alpha spot a ride into town, despite no prior evidence that he and Uncle Carlo knew each other outside of mutual attempts at murdering the other. He’d like to say that as good a mage as he is, when it comes to the fucking killer shadow of Beacon Hills, he’s apparently in the same position as the people who are in charge of figuring out how to update the flu vaccine for the coming year—

Okay. Even he’s got limits at how much he beats himself up, and epidemiology comparisons are pushing it. But still. “Man, we are fucking this one up,” he says. “I mean, it says something when Alan fucking Deaton ends up driving because I’m wiped from holding Talia’s insides together and Scott is busy socking Peter to get him to let us put her in the car.”

“Stiles,” Lydia sighs, leaning down to drop a comforting arm over his shoulders. She reaches out and pries the coffee-stained mug out of his hand, and then pushes something nubbly and cold and oddly crackly in its place. “If you don’t get out of this kitchen and go to bed, I’ll sock _you_.”

He looks up at her, and then swallows his words at the sight of the dark under-eye circles that she’s letting show. She glowers at him with bloodshot eyes and Stiles takes the ice-pack and gets up from the table and gets his ass out of there.

Halfway up the stairs he stops and he almost pulls a Scott and turns around and goes outside to—well, he can’t sleep on the roof, he doesn’t have the claws to stud in to keep himself from falling, but maybe he can find a bush or something. Because he can hear little whimpery voices coming from Scott’s bedroom and it’s way, way past morning, but after a second Scott’s muffled voice chimes in, and his best buddy’s still at it, trying to keep the kids calm.

So fuck it, least Stiles can do. He doesn’t really want to head for his room anyway; they didn’t want the kids to keep fussing at their mother, so Scott took them and they put Chris in his and Lydia’s room for now. Chris should be dead asleep—his injuries healed up during the drive back, but werewolf healing is mostly flesh, not endurance, and he lost a lot of blood on top of being in lousy condition in the first place. And even if he’s not talking, and hell, killed his father right off the bat, no waffling, Stiles still doesn’t really want to just sit around and look at him.

Stiles goes to the third door and he’s raising his hand to knock when he really registers the ice-pack that Lydia handed to him. He’s still looking at it when the door opens and a bleary, wobbly Peter looks out at him.

Scott actually had to hit Peter twice, because Peter woke up in the middle of the drive when Stiles was knitting Talia’s intestines back together and magical healing is the bomb for quick fixes, but it’s not any less painful than doing it the manual way. So Peter’s still got something of a black eye, though the swelling’s gone down enough that he’s not cockeyed anymore.

“Hey,” Stiles says, brilliantly, because that’s the extent of his planning and quipping abilities at the moment. “Um.”

Peter blinks at him, slowly, the way tired people do when they’re gradually adjusting their judgment of reality. And then Peter shrugs and backs up and then goes back to the bed. Talia’s out of the danger zone but she’s got a lot of deep, deep sleeping to do, and she is very much engaged in that when Peter curls up next to her, his head by her feet as he continues to blink sleepily at Stiles over the footboard.

Stiles comes inside and shuts the door. Since he’s there, he checks over Talia, and then he sits down on the sliver of bed that’s left between Peter and the edge. Peter’s knees are prodding into his tailbone but neither of them move.

Then Stiles holds out the ice-pack. Peter looks at it and his lip starts to lift in his usual sneer, and then it’s like he just forgets how to move his mouth halfway through it. He puts his head down on his folded arm, curving himself to keep looking at Stiles. He does take the ice-pack, but he just puts it on the bed and arches his hand over it, kind of like he’s holding a small pet.

“Stiles?” he says.

“She’s gonna be fine,” Stiles says automatically. Then he makes a face and gets that done a beat before Peter musters up the energy to look annoyed. “Sorry. ‘m tired and I get kind of patronizing when I’m like that.”

“You must be constantly exhausted,” Peter says after a second.

Stiles looks at him. Peter doesn’t look any different, the features of his face still struggling to find a coherent expression, and Stiles just—he laughs. “Okay. Okay, yeah, I deserve that.”

Peter’s mouth twitches. It’s not exactly a smile, but it’s at least got more personality than an exhausted spasm. And then he pushes up on his arm and looks at Stiles, suddenly tense, his eyes over-bright and intense.

“Stiles,” he says again. “When I went evil—was it—did I kill family?”

The fucking roof, even if he doesn’t have claws, Stiles thinks, just—freezing up. And then he shakes his head and puts his hand up to his temple and his head hurts and they’ve already fucked this up so badly and goddamn it, Peter looks so young, and scared. He looks way too much like Stiles remembers looking, way, way at the beginning of the time-jumps.

“Peter,” Stiles starts. He pauses, and he doesn’t even try to come up with a good way, he just prays that he’s not irreversibly horrible. “Peter. For the last time. You and the other—”

“I know they’re not me, all right? I know I get to choose, but I just—you said use the future while it’s here, and I—I killed my _uncle_.” Peter cringes a little, where he’s lying, and then his eyes widen with remembered fear again. “I killed him, and I didn’t even think twice. And—but I’m thinking now, right, and I’d do it again and is this how it starts? Because other mes did this, they must have, you’re stalling and that means you’d say yes. And he didn’t even hate us, he just wanted what we have and we don’t even _have_ anything. Our house is locked up and Talia lost her—Mark was a—”

“Okay. Okay, okay, no, just— _okay_ , no,” Stiles says, raising his voice till Peter’s low, frantic words finally tumble themselves into a strained silence. He looks at Peter for another second, then lowers his hand and scoots himself along the bed towards Peter.

Who flinches again and then holds still, but the gorge of his throat bobs heavily with a slow swallow. His hand squeezes the ice-pack till the chips wrapped in the towel start to crack.

Stile stops when he’s still a few inches away. He lifts his hand, lets Peter see it, and then puts it down on Peter’s shoulder. “Okay. Peter. Listen, there—okay, honestly, when we first started, I had some really stupid ideas about how changing timelines worked. We all did. You think it’s just—telling people what’s going to happen, but sometimes they do the same thing for different reasons. And then you think people are who they are, it’s nature over nurture, and then you end up in a timeline where you’re the big evil and people actually killed you before you got there—”

Peter’s startled enough to snap out of his nervous daze, his eyes focusing tightly on Stiles. “What?”

“Er. Yeah. So…you can’t meet your double, but you can see where your double has _been_. And sometimes where your double’s been is pure evil,” Stiles says. He presses his lips together; he always wants to laugh hysterically, thinking of that timeline, but he’s pretty sure that that will win him subzero points with Peter right now. “It was. It was weird, and in a really, really, weird, bad, awkward way, sort of impressive, and…anyway. My point is, Peter, is this shit is messy and just forget it and why’d you kill your uncle again?”

“Because he was going to kill my sister!” Peter says defensively. “He was going to take alpha from her and Talia was going to let him, just because—if it’s alpha Carlo or getting killed too, I’d take getting killed any day. And Talia’s—Talia’s my sister. I don’t…it’s not even her being alpha, she’s my sister and…and I don’t want to lose her.”

Stiles nods, and then, when Peter gives him a strange look, he throws a shrug in for good measure. “Honestly, that sounds like a decent reason to me,” Stiles says. “I mean. Look at us, we go dicking around in other people’s lives just because we can’t figure out how to just live out our own.”

That’s maybe a little too much information. Whatever, Stiles thinks, he’s too tired to even try and really pass it off as sarcasm.

“So…so you’re not going to talk about how my eyes don’t look so different now?” Peter says after a long moment.

“Peter, your eyes are blue. They’ve always been blue,” Stiles says. “The color-coded glow thing is stupid anyway. And I think, at the end of the day, if you want to be evil, you’re going to be evil, and it’s got nothing to do with anything else. And that’s the whole secret of time-traveling.”

He’s looking away, but Peter moves and Stiles looks back. Peter pauses, and then he tucks up his legs so that he’s almost leaning against Stiles’ shoulder. “That’s…not flashy.”

Stiles smiles, and the smile that’s been poking at the edges of Peter’s mouth wavers out, then darts away as Peter shifts a little more, till finally Stiles just puts his arm around Peter and pulls him over. For a second Peter’s stiff, and then he suddenly slumps so that Stiles barely keeps them on the bed, tucking his head under Stiles’ chin and pressing loosely-curled fists to Stiles’ thigh.

“I just—I thought she was going to die,” Peter whispers. “I really thought he was going to kill her. And I missed her—she only just came back, finally got rid of that asshole Mark, and I already missed her and she’s—she’s different, she’s a lot—I didn’t even know she’d had Cora and they’re so annoying and dirty but Talia and them, they’re—they’re _pack_ and I only just got to see them and I thought—I thought—”

“Okay,” Stiles says, very quietly. “Okay. She’s okay, Peter, she’s okay. She’ll be okay. You guys will be okay.”

Peter hitches, the top of his head bumping into Stiles’ chin, and then his face burrows into the front of Stiles’ shirt and Stiles can feel a little dampness starting to seep through. He tugs Peter over a little more and Peter shivers, a low hurt-animal whine coming out of him. Stiles can’t purr but he gets his other arm across and gives Peter’s side an awkward pat, and that’s when Peter starts sobbing.

It doesn’t last that long. Isn’t that loud either. He’s not sure Peter is still sad so much as just cutting loose a lot of stuff at once, especially as Peter slides right from that into dozing, and then into real sleep.

When he’s sure it won’t wake Peter, Stiles stretches over and rolls the ice-pack till he can get hold of it. He can’t reach Peter’s eye, so he’s putting it against his temple when the door nudges open and Lydia comes in. She looks at him, then lifts her hands to show the small plastic vial she’d been in the process of closing.

Lydia hands him a few pills for his growing migraine, and then pops into the bathroom for a glass of water. When he’s had his share, she takes the rest and sits so she’s on the same side of the bed, leaning up against the headboard.

“You didn’t scream,” Stiles says after a moment.

“Well, Laura did more than enough of that,” Lydia mutters, her eyes closed. “Cora threw up on Basil Stag Hare. And in my Louboutins.”

Stiles hums and waits.

“No, but…I felt it come and go,” Lydia adds, much lower. “It was close, Stiles.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know,” Stiles says. He looks down at Peter. “But it always is, Lyds.”

* * *

Scott doesn’t like leaving the kids alone, but he can tell from the heartbeats that everyone else is still exhausted. Even—right, Deaton stayed to help reinforce the wards against the shadow monster and they gave him the living-room couch, that’s the extra heartbeat.

The kids also seem deeply asleep, worn out after staying up and fretting over their mother, so Scott figures it’ll be okay to run down and just grab something to eat. Except when he gets up, he’s so lightheaded from exhaustion—he might heal if he cuts himself, but he figures he’d better pop into the bathroom and drink some water and splash his face a few times.

Maybe that’s why he’s caught off-guard, when he opens the door and finds that Chris is up and standing in the hall with a plate of food. 

Scott stiffens and Chris’ eyes flare blue, but the other man doesn’t move except for his eyes, which track Scott as he sighs and lets go of the door knob, and then realizes he’s so tired that he’s taking the face towel out with him. So Scott puts that back, double-checks that he remembered to turn off the water while he’s at it, and then steps out into the hall. “I thought you were sleeping,” he says, when Chris doesn’t say anything.

Chris moves his shoulders as if he’s shrugging and then changing his mind and trying to hide it. “I woke up.”

“Okay. Okay, well…well, right,” Scott mutters. He puts his hand up to the side of his head, then sighs. He needs to sleep, too.

“I—” Chris starts, shifting forward as Scott makes to walk past him. He stops and moves the plate awkwardly, and then abruptly shoves it at Scott. “I heard you moving around.”

Scott frowns, then almost asks whether that was what woke Chris. And then the plate bobs into view again and he looks at it, and things fall into place. “Oh. Oh, I was going down upstairs, I can get myself something, you don’t need to—”

“I ate already, this is yours,” Chris says, his voice rising a little with irritation. Then he winces and tucks his head down, before his eyes flick uncertainly back up to Scott. “I just…figured. You’ve been up what, almost forty-eight hours now?”

“I think it’s worse when you count,” Scott says. He honestly isn’t totally sure that Chris has eaten, and if Chris is lying about that, well, Scott’s an alpha and he also hasn’t spent the last couple months living on the run. But he’s got just enough common sense still awake to realize that being polite here is just going to start an argument, and he’s just tired enough that he can’t bring himself to fight.

He takes the plate and Chris sags a little, his head rising slightly so he’s no longer in submissive posture. Scott takes a step back towards the kids, then looks at Chris again. They’re all tired and worn-out, but Chris looks…it’s like he’s permanently a little saggy compared to how he was before. When he was a seething, straining live wire, always making Scott check whether he was going to snap. And now he’s just…just drooping, all over, loose like he’s lost some of the strings that held him up.

Chris is also fidgeting. Because Scott’s been staring at him for probably an unreasonably long time, and Scott’s alpha so Chris isn’t just going to walk off. Scott curses silently and glances at the bedroom door again, and then gestures for Chris to follow him. When all Chris does is snap up his head and stare in confusion, Scott gestures again and then just goes and sits down against the wall next to the door. He reaches out and nudges the door open, just enough so that he can see the kids on the bed, and then he puts the plate on his lap and starts eating.

It’s cold leftover pizza. Scott vaguely thinks that the fridge should also have some leftover guacamole, which probably would be better recovery food and which was always his mom’s go-to post-shift snack, and…he’s not going downstairs, he slowly realizes. He really…he needs to stop.

He looks up at a footstep, and then shifts his legs back as Chris gingerly settles down in front of him. Chris freezes with one hand down on the floor, then drops the rest of the way. The man’s giving Scott one of those incredulous-to-resentful looks and Scott thinks that Chris must be feeling better.

“Why the hell are you so _nice_?” Chris says. “I don’t even understand how this works for you. This is—this is a world where I should’ve shot my goddamn so-called best friend in the head, but I didn’t, and three years later it gets my mother killed, but you just—you make it work.”

“Really?” Scott says. Well, mumbles, really. He’s in that weird place where he doesn’t really have an appetite but his stomach is killing him, so he’s just trying to stuff pizza into it as fast as possible, and get that over with. He grimaces and wipes his mouth off with the back of his hand and then swallows. “I mean. Look. I just—I don’t know, it’s how I was raised. My mom always said you’d catch more flies with—sorry. Sorry, I…wrong thing to say.”

Chris keeps looking at him, so annoyed that Scott’s actually not sure Chris even heard that, and then he exhales and looks off to the side. His hand comes up and he ducks his head so that he can pull at the hair at the top of his head.

“Hey,” Scott says. “So are you all right?”

Somehow, that’s wronger to say than mentioning moms, because Chris’ head jerks up and his eyes are wide and glowing. His hands go down and their fingers dig deep into the carpet, and Scott hears the scrape of claws. Then he abruptly shakes his head, a soft, strangled noise coming from him.

“I’m sorry,” Scott says again. Lamely, he doesn’t even need Stiles or Lydia awake to point that out for him, but God, his mouth just keeps rambling on. “I—look, normally I’m not such a—a jerk about things, but I just…I know I basically pretended you didn’t exist for the last few days, but I’ve, well, I’ve got time now and if you want to talk about your father—”

“Not really,” Chris mutters. He breathes in sharply, then slowly looks back at Scott. “So he’s dead. So I—I actually didn’t really think about after. I guess I just thought—he just went down a lot—a lot faster than I figured. And…and honestly, Scott, I make an insane pass at you and you call me out for it, rightfully, and now we’re talking about Gerard?”

“You’re having a hard time with your family,” Scott says. They lock eyes for a moment, and then mutually agree that that’s just a stupid way to put it, but they’ll both be polite and let it go. “And on top of that, you just turned and you didn’t have an alpha or pack, or really, anybody, who could help you through it and no matter how much you knew beforehand, that’s still rough. And then you got here and you _still_ have nobody helping you even though I—anyway, what I’m trying to say it, I wasn’t going to hold that against you. You were upset.”

“This is what I mean,” Chris says after a second. “You’re apologizing to me for not giving me enough of a hand.”

Scott sighs. “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

“A lot.” Chris sits back a little, then half-hides a grimace as he drops one hand to his thigh. He’s all healed but when you’re in bad health, sometimes the aches can last as long as they would for a regular person. “I wasn’t thinking about it before, but now that Gerard’s gone and—and I guess the Argents are down to a werewolf, of all things…you’re a mess and I’m not—I’m not sure you’re better off than me, actually.”

He sucks in his breath at the end, his shoulders moving back like he thinks Scott is going to lash out at him. Which Scott is not going to do, both because that just isn’t him and because, honestly, Chris isn’t saying anything that Scott hasn’t ended up admitting to Stiles at some point.

So Scott eats the rest of the pizza instead. Chris sits and watches him, occasionally changing his sitting position. The man’s got one knee up and circled to his chest with his arm when he finally speaks again. “So, you and my daughter. Was it something she did to you?”

Scott looks at him. “This is weird.”

“Time travel is weird,” Chris says, a touch defensively. “I’m just…I’m just trying to figure out something.”

“What?” Scott says. “What, whether I’m being nice to you just because I miss her?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s in there somewhere, but that’s not what bothers…I just want to know whether you regret being here,” Chris says. He pauses, looking a little surprised, and then he nods sharply. “I think that’s it. I don’t know whether you’re here because you really do believe in what you people say, about fixing things. Or if you’re just here because—because somewhere along the line, you saw where you wanted to be and you missed your shot at it for some reason. Because Stiles said you can’t go back to a timeline once you leave it.”

Scott starts to reply, and then stares at the empty, greasy plate in his lap instead. The thing about fixing timelines, he thinks, is that it does always keep you on the edge of exhaustion. There’s just so much to keep straight and to remember to do, and even with help, even with the time gained by going before critical events happened, you’re always barely making it in time. Just take how close they came tonight, and with all their prior dealings with Gerard, all their knowledge about how the man thinks.

“Okay, so I was in love with your daughter,” Scott says. It’s awkward but he plows through it, just like with his stomach and the pizza. “And I have—I have wanted to stay with her, a couple versions of her, but it never worked out and I kept thinking, next time I’ll get it right. And then I met this version of her who was—she was married, she was happy, but she was still All—she was still the kind of person who was willing to sit down with me and talk about it, just to help me figure it out, and that’s when I realized. It’s not getting it right with her. I’m—I’m past that, I’m not looking for that now when I jump, but she…she’s a really big part of why I started jumping in the first place, and I guess it just takes a while to settle into something new.”

Chris listens silently, leaning slightly forward. He doesn’t seem to be that weirded out; if anything, he seems to be carefully considering everything that Scott’s saying. And right then he does resemble all the other Chrises that Scott has known, and it’s eerie.

But then he shifts up and his eyes lock dead-on Scott’s, and they’re way too open. Raw, like a wound that keeps getting scraped, but there’s nothing in the way of that, no attempt to hide it. Chris doesn’t even look like he’s thought about hiding it, and that’s never been in other versions. They couldn’t even help it, Scott thinks, they’d just been living so long with secrets that they couldn’t turn it off, even at their most honest.

“I just really, really wanted to kill my father,” Chris says. “I taught myself how to be a werewolf, I got a hold on that so I could get up and keep going, and I didn’t think about pack, or the family code, or my family, period, and even if all the teams are with other families, there’s still the house and the accounts and the—it’s just, now I’m alive and Gerard isn’t, and…”

“Please don’t kill yourself,” Scott says. He’s not thinking. It’s not triggered by anything Chris does either; Chris doesn’t suddenly look like he’s going to run off or anything like that, and he looks so blank now that he obviously wasn’t thinking along those lines. “Look, whatever you end up doing, it’s just…I feel like that’s such a waste.”

“Even after everything you’ve seen,” Chris says, a little skeptically. “Seen and done. After just…figuring out you’re still jumping because you don’t know what else to do.”

Scott almost says that that’s not why he does it, and then he stops. He thinks it over and then ends up laughing a little under his breath, because even if that’s not totally accurate, it’s still probably better than anything he can come up with.

“Yeah,” he says. “I don’t know, all right? I just—I like helping people. I like being friendly, and polite, and I like—I like hoping, even if I don’t know what I’m hoping for. I guess I think if I just keep it up long enough, I’ll figure things out. Maybe that’s stupid, but it’s what I got.”

Chris tilts his head, and then he abruptly pushes his knee down and rolls over it, going onto his hands and knees. They’re so close that that puts him over Scott’s lap. Scott grabs Chris’ arm but Chris has already stopped, his lip sucked under his teeth, a teetering, half-wild look on his face.

“It’s stupid, yeah, but—” he bobs in and his breath gusts across Scott’s mouth and then he leans back, his head dropping so that Scott’s staring at the top of it “—look, maybe it’s weird for you, and maybe it’s fucked-up for me that I just don’t care, but…but _I’m_ here.”

His head comes up just enough for their eyes to meet, and Chris’ stare is hard and intense, and at the same time it’s painfully uncertain. He’s not putting himself up as a substitute this time. That’s not it, and what it is, is almost worse.

“Just—you’re here,” he says urgently. “And so long as you are—can you just—can you just see—”

He shifts and maybe he’s going to, maybe he isn’t, but before they can find out, Scott’s jerked his hand from Chris’ shoulder to the side of Chris’ neck. Chris goes stiff, his eyes blazing and then fading to regular human—which is still shockingly light in the darkness—as he lets himself hang against Scott’s hand.

“I—look, just—” And Scott just has nothing left right now but blind instinct, and that has him curl his fingers, then tug till Chris is sprawling over him, a disappointed grunt tangling up with a surprised inhale.

The plate gets in the way. Scott worms it out, tossing it to the carpet besides them, and then moves his legs so that he can finish slotting Chris between them. He moves his grip to the back of Chris’ neck, keeping it firm as Chris briefly struggles, and then just as briefly tries to push in smother-tight. Waits that out till Chris gives up and just slumps where he is, his head pressed in against Scott’s shoulder, bridge of his nose nudging up under the side of Scott’s jaw, and then he loosens his fingers and lets them trail down to Chris’ back.

“I’m not doing this right now,” Scott says after a few seconds. “Look, whatever this is—it’s not the right time. But…but look, I’m around, I’ll be around, and…and you want pack, you can have pack, at least.”

Chris makes a thick, half-angry, half-bitter noise. His head moves sharply, but not even far enough to drive his nose into the bottom of Scott’s jaw, and then he grunts and settles back. He’s tense, but he gets even more tense when Scott moves his leg away from him, and relaxes when Scott moves it back.

“I don’t want just that. I don’t have my father taking up all the space and now…I want to know you,” he finally says. “And I—I’ve got more than just my vendetta. I want you to know that.”

“Well, okay,” Scott says. “Okay. So we’ll see, but later. Okay?”

Chris doesn’t answer him, but the man doesn’t get off him either. Eventually, he gets too tired to keep up the tension too, and he goes slack by inches, a grudging wave that starts at his shoulders and then carries down through the rest of his body. His hand, which was in a fist, starts to uncurl against Scott’s arm. Then it closes up again.

Then, slowly, it loosens up. It hovers in place, then gingerly settles back against Scott’s arm. Open-palmed. Scott puts his head back against the wall, and as Chris’ fingers twitch into a grip around his arm, he sighs and closes his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course they were going to run into an evil!Stiles timeline.
> 
> So if you think I'm being mean about separating the kids, my underlying thinking (which didn't totally make it into the actual story) is that Talia's an alpha and instinctively tries to respond to her pack's distress. If the kids had stayed in the room, they would have kept trying to wake her and she would've kept trying to wake up to comfort them and she's so injured that that'd put her healing in danger.


	8. Chapter 8

When Peter wakes up, he feels terrible. His neck and spine are all twisted up with aches and cramps, and when he attempts to straighten out, he falls off the bed and even werewolf reflexes don’t save him. Because he was teetering on the edge to begin with because—

He freezes, remembering why he’d let himself be crowded all the way over in the first place, and then he carefully lifts his head and looks across the bed.

“Peter,” Talia mutters. She’s lying on her back, her arms a little out from her body, head sunk deep into the pillow. She doesn’t look nearly as pale, but her scent is still thin and sharp, leaving a sweetish, unpleasant taste coating the inside of Peter’s mouth when he breathes out. “What are you doing?”

“Getting up,” Peter says after a moment. He grabs the edge of the bed to pull himself up and then snorts a little, a whiff of Stiles—and Lydia, she was here too—coming off the blankets. He flushes and then rolls his eyes at himself and scrubs at his cheek, then runs his hand back through his hair as he leans over the side of the mattress. “It’s morning. And…and the kids, we just moved them to the other bedroom, they’re okay, they just wouldn’t let you—”

“I know, I can hear them. They’re sleeping. Probably shouldn’t wake them.” Talia tenses all over before a breath bursts out of her, cracking like a gunshot. She relaxes, then tenses up again, and one of her hands jerks up. It’s shaky but she moves it in front of her face and flexes its fingers, and then lets it flop back to the bed. “I’m actually still an alpha. I can’t even…”

Peter wants to reach out and check whether Talia’s…running a temperature, or showing any signs where he should go grab Stiles. And he doesn’t really want to check, because he’s not even—he’s not even really ready to believe she’s actually still alive, let alone ready to worry about whether she’s recovering. 

And the other thing. “You’re still alpha,” he finally says. He takes a deep breath, absently fiddling with the edge of the sheet. “Carlo’s dead. I—I—it was me.”

Talia’s silent. He can see her brow furrowing up, and then her upper lip lifts in a silent snarl as she struggles to move. Then she goes limp again, her head lolling against the pillow as she makes an irritated noise. “Damn it. Peter, get up here where I can see you.”

Peter startles, then collects himself and pushes up onto the bed. He wavers a little, not sure whether he should scoot up and sit, or just bend over, before he just sets his shoulders and pulls his legs onto the bed, and hauls himself up till he can swing his head over Talia.

Her eyes are bloodshot and have what looks like a yellowish film over them, and crusts built up at the corners, but they’re alert enough. They flick back and forth, taking Peter in, and then Talia sucks in a breath and heaves, and gets her hand up. She puts her fingers against Peter’s cheek as he looks down at her, confused.

“Good, you still have both of them,” she says. She pauses. “Your eyes, Peter. Carlo was always a—a cheating son of—”

“You’re okay?” Peter blurts out. “I mean, you’re okay with—”

“I’ve been better, but I’ll heal from this,” Talia mutters. Her fingers are starting to shake again and their tips patter down Peter’s cheek, then push briefly up under his chin before Talia gives up and lets her arm drop. “You’re okay. That’s what I care ab—Peter, he was going to kill us.”

“He was going to kill _you_ ,” Peter says, unable to stop his voice from trembling. “And you were just—I saw you, you were going to _let_ him, like he really was going to let me—”

Of all things, Talia actually snickers at him. “Well, he would’ve been really stupid to let you go, seeing as you ended up killing him.”

Peter—nods, and then he starts to smile, even though he’s still pretty sure that if he tries to say something, his voice will wobble. But when Talia’s right, she’s right.

Talia keeps looking at him and her amusement fades. “You’re okay, right?” she says more quietly. “Because it’s okay, you know. The first one…and your first one had to be Carlo, of all people.”

“Start off with a bang,” Peter says, trying to shrug. “At least it’ll help show the rest of them we aren’t weak.”

“You weren’t ever, anyway,” Talia says. Her arm twitches like she might try to lift it again and Peter puts his hand down to stop her just as she instead bumps it into his knee. “You were strong without the blue eyes, Peter, and now you’re even stronger. All right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think…yeah, I’m all right.” Peter glances away because she’s too tired to be giving him that sister look, but it’s Talia, so she’s doing it anyway, and then he shrugs again. “I’m…I didn’t think he was as bad as Dad, but I’m not going to—it’s not like we saw that much of him. And I just—there’s one alpha I ever listen to, and it wasn’t ever going to be Uncle Carlo with the _great_ idea to boost us by advertising for ex-pro athletes and then biting them.”

Talia smiles again. “He could’ve thought that one through a little more,” she says. She pauses, her eyes both softening and sharpening. “Could’ve thought through teaming up with Gerard Argent, too, but…that’s done, and good.”

“Good,” Peter echoes. And he doesn’t disagree, it’s just—he looks at his sister and she really, honestly is okay with him. Is proud of him, even, and he just was so close to losing her and he just. It’s just hard for a second, even if everything is okay.

“You look half-starved again,” Talia says after a second. She takes a deep breath, then suddenly heaves herself up. She gets her head off the pillow and a few inches up the headboard, but then slumps back, panting, before he can even reach over for her. “Goddamn it. I feel like a baby…no, I’ll be fine, just go eat something before you fall over too.”

Peter hesitates, then lifts his hand, and Talia’s eyes flare red as she glowers at him. He snatches his hand back, brows raised, and then he shrugs and edges back. “Okay, okay. Do you—do you want…water, or…”

“I’m getting a shower first,” Talia mutters, though from the way she’s eyeing the distance between her and the bathroom, he thinks it might be more along the lines of, she’s figuring out to work her legs first. “I still smell like our asshole uncle. God. If they were hanging around up here all night, you’d think they could do something about that…Peter?”

“Hmmm?” Peter says. Blankly. Ignoring his stupid body that won’t stop blushing.

Talia’s eyes narrow at him. She sniffs a couple times, a lot harder than she really needs to. Then she tilts her head. “Well…”

“They did help,” Peter says. He ducks his head, then makes himself look up at her. “Look, at this point, with everything, they’re sticking around, and maybe they’re weird, and still not that great about explaining what they do and why they do it, but—”

“Do you like him?” Talia says.

“I—” Peter exhales in frustration “—he helped. All right? He—he helped me. And…”

“And that’s all right, I’m not saying…they still irritate me, but…well, we’re down to killing family, after all,” Talia says, her voice briefly dropping to a mutter. “And I think you did the right thing, Peter, but that doesn’t change the fact that…that well, we need the help. So I’m glad, if you needed help, that he helped. I just want to make sure that—”

“I’m not stupid,” Peter says.

Talia rolls her eyes. “But you are stubborn. Just—just don’t let it be for something else, all right, Peter? Because there’s just too much going on already, and anyway, if you’re going to—I know I said it’d be good to take advantage if he was going to talk to you anyway, but I take that back if…it’s just better to keep other things out of it, that’s all I’m saying. Just don’t make it about anything except…except that you like him.”

Her voice twists a little at the end, and for some reason Peter thinks of that shadow thing, hanging between them, not letting him get over and help his sister as she fought. He knows the whole story about Mark now, but he suddenly thinks that Talia must have felt lonely too, watching her so-called mate show his true colors. As lonely as Peter had been rattling around their house, biting back his frustrations with their parents and counting down the days till he was old enough to run away.

Speaking of. He snorts, and then sees how she pricks alert and shakes his head. “No, it’s…just, I still have cake, don’t I?”

“You do. Custom order.” A little mischief glints in Talia’s eyes, even if she still looks worried about him. “I think he even bought the bakery special mint jelly to use.”

“Oh, shut up, it’s just a cake,” Peter mutters. “I’m not that cheap.”

Talia laughs at him, but when he moves to get up, she shifts ever-so-slightly in his direction. Peter pauses, then drops forward and just hugs her, just really quick. Then he gets up and he gets out before she can tease him anymore.

Come to think of it, he is hungry, and cake for breakfast sounds deviant and inappropriate and just delicious right now. Which is how Peter finds himself rooting around in the fridge a few minutes later, trying to extract his cake without having a waterfall of bagged salad greens—Scott is strangely insistent on the regular-human definition of a balanced diet—come out with it.

He’s finally got the container out, and he’s toeing the fridge door shut when he nearly drops the cake because Stiles is behind the door. Stiles blinks as Peter yelps and juggles the cake and then looks down in mingled panic and annoyance to see whether the cake’s mushed its frosting into the top. “So…things cool?” Stiles says.

Peter backs up, bumps into the kitchen table, and then puts the cake down on that. “Talia’s awake, but she was going for the shower so I don’t think you should go in there.”

Stiles nods and steps around Peter. He swings kind of close and Peter’s going to call him out for it when Stiles abruptly swerves and bends down, and opens up the cabinet right next to Peter’s leg. He moves some things around, pulls out a hunting knife as long as his forearm, mutters that that’s supposed to be with the carving tools, and then puts it back in. Then he takes out a serving knife, which he hands to Peter.

“So,” he says. He doesn’t look like he’s going to leave, so Peter unboxes the cake and cuts a slice while he watches. “Uh. Happy birthday.”

“Thanks,” Peter says. Some frosting smears off the knife onto his hand, so he puts the knife down and then lips it off. The frosting’s good, still fluffy even after sitting overnight in the fridge. “So no party.”

Stiles shrugs. “I guess if you don’t count last night.”

“If I count last night, then I have to include Gerard Argent and my dead uncle, and I don’t think either of them deserve birthday festivities,” Peter mutters. He sniffs a little, looking at the cake—the smell alone is rich on chocolate, leavened with the spike of mint, and just plain decadent—and then turns, only to have something poke him in the chest.

A spoon, which Stiles is holding out to him. “I kind of want to see what you think,” Stiles says, sort of apologizing. “I had a huge debate with the head baker about whether they could use mint jelly the supermarket didn’t sell, but the shit they had was fluorescent and tasted like it was box mix or something, and—”

The thing is, Peter thinks, it’s not like he ever much got into the other plan. He never gets Stiles to tell him about the things he’s trying to get Stiles to tell him about. He always gets all this other information instead and—and it’s annoying, and fascinating, and annoying because it’s fascinating, and anyway, Talia doesn’t need to worry. “Why don’t you try it?”

Stiles blinks hard, then raises both hands, looking incredulous. “Oh, no, no way, not before the birthday boy. That is a level of asshole to which I have not yet ascended, and I’ve ascended a _lot_ so I have no inadequacy feelings there.”

Peter…should say something, preferably witty, but his brain’s slow this morning. It needs cake.

He sticks the spoon into the slice he cut and then puts it in his mouth. Then takes it out and puts it down by the slice as he chews and swallows.

“Good?” Stiles asks.

Peter nods, then drags himself away from the ridiculously heavenly taste to speak. “Really good.”

“Oh, good. I mean, seeing as…so I was gonna, um, do the present thing too, and actually, we all were, since minding our manners and mending fences and just showing we really don’t think you’re set to be evil, but—” Stiles rambles on.

Peter just. Doesn’t really think. He just. He swings around and Stiles is right next to him, and Stiles is backing up so Peter lunges awkwardly and presses their lips together.

They don’t stay like that very long. Stiles makes a startled noise that moves his mouth away, and then Peter’s off-balance anyway, so Peter ends up grabbing at the counter to catch himself. And Stiles helps by catching his shoulders, but that just moves them further apart.

“Uh,” Stiles says.

“Well, for my present,” Peter starts, looking up. 

Except he can’t finish, because one, it’s the kind of remark that pops up when you’re tired and you think it’s fine, but the moment it starts to come out of your mouth, you realize how completely idiotic and lame and uncreative it sounds. And two, he sees Stiles’ face and smells the man and Stiles just is confused. So three, now Peter’s face is burning and he hates himself and maybe even hates Stiles a little and he just wishes he’d taken the cake and run.

“Stop look—it’s not—” Peter sputters, because Stiles won’t stop _staring_ at him and he can’t stop his mouth and the hole he’ll need to dig himself after this just keeps getting deeper and deeper. “You’re always walking around with scent maskers so how should I kn—”

Stiles is looking at him, but one second it’s one way and the other—the man doesn’t even move but it’s like a clone got swapped in, the change is so drastic. It’s just Stiles is looking at him and suddenly it’s _burning_ , not just Peter’s face but Stiles’ look, it’s burning and it’s got Peter swallowed up before he knows it, and even before Stiles pulls him forward, a tiny seed of a whimper’s in his throat.

And then he’s up against the edge of the table, being _kissed_. A real kiss, not the fumbled glancing thing he did, all lips and press and heat, like Stiles has his mouth there but he’s really got it all through Peter’s body. Peter gasps into it and then Stiles’ tongue is flicking over his lower lip, quick and hot, here and gone and Peter whines, already missing it, and Stiles makes a low, almost-werewolf noise in his throat and shoves Peter against the table.

Peter stumbles, flails a little and then finds his hands on Stiles’ arms. His lower lip pokes up into Stiles’ mouth, by accident but then Stiles sucks on it on purpose, catching it a little between his teeth. Not biting, not even stinging, but the pressure of it makes Peter’s knees weak, sets all his nerves to dancing. He stumbles again and Stiles laughs into his mouth, still kissing him, and then there’s a hard upwards push at his—his _ass_ , Stiles has both hands cupped under Peter’s ass and is holding Peter up into his mouth, and it’s embarrassing because Peter is _not_ that much shorter and also it’s hot. God, is it hot.

“Adorable,” Stiles snickers. He nibbles on Peter’s lip again, then squeezes Peter’s buttocks when Peter makes a protesting noise. So Peter shivers and moans and stretches up into the man’s mouth, and Stiles actually hikes him up to half-sit on the table, wedging between Peter’s legs and just _kissing_ him. “Complete brat, too. So, this okay, or you still want a gift?”

“You’re so—so—so—” Peter’s irritated enough to shove forward and really nail Stiles on the mouth, and he drags down on the grip he’s got on Stiles’ arms till he gets a little stutter in the man’s breath. “Yes, I want a gift, do you think I’m easy?”

Stiles laughs again. He keeps his hands on Peter’s ass but pulls back enough to look into Peter’s eyes, and it’s a little comforting to see that for all the smart remarks, his eyes look as blown as Peter feels.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, well, so you wanna go out?”

Peter almost snaps at him again, but then he realizes the man isn’t joking. He blinks and looks up at Stiles, who—almost looks nervous. And then he nods. He clears his throat—and still ends up sounding a little sticky. “Fine.”

“Fine,” Stiles repeats, and now he’s being sarcastic. But affectionately, with a warmth in his eyes that makes Peter want to tuck down under his chin and never mind if that’s embarrassing to admit. “Well. Okay. _Fine_.”

“I want to eat cake now, too,” Peter mutters, though he sways a little towards Stiles and can’t help a pleased noise when Stiles’ eyes darken. “And no, you don’t get to try it. I think after the night I had, I should get the whole thing.”

“It’s your cake anyway, Peter,” Stiles says. He backs up some more and Peter slides down off the table, and then he lets go of Peter’s ass. Then, before Peter can do more than flush at realizing he misses that, Stiles lifts his hands and cups Peter’s face and kisses Peter again. Softer, less crushing, and prying Peter that much more open when he backs off. “’sides, I think I had a pretty good taste there.”

Peter catches up on his breath, and then he swipes at Stiles. Who pivots neatly out of the way, then strolls out of the kitchen like…like an asshole. Honestly, Peter thinks, grinning like an idiot.

Honestly. It’s a good birthday.

* * *

Lydia leans against the doorway as Talia fumbles after the locks dropping out of her fingers, then gives up with a frustrated huff, her hands slamming down against the sink as her hair tumbles down around her face. The woman hits hard enough that the mirror over the sink rattles. Talia looks up, then stops halfway through an annoyed growl, tilting her head to listen to something.

Peter is still in the kitchen, so Lydia assumes the children must be waking up. “They’re with Scott.”

“I know,” Talia mutters. She lifts one hand and bats at some of the locks hanging in her eyes, and then sighs and moves her arms so that she’s leaning onto them, rather than using them to push away from the sink. “Look, I know we’ve been antagonizing each other since we met, but—”

“I’m sorry,” Lydia says.

Talia stops. She brushes at her hair, then turns around and looks curiously at Lydia. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” Lydia repeats. “We told you…we told you we had Gerard covered, and we didn’t. So I’m sorry.”

For a few moments Talia simply squints at Lydia, as if she thinks Lydia might be a mirage. She straightens up, and then plucks the hair band from where it’s fallen on the counter and just pushes her hair back into a messy low ponytail at the back of her neck.

“You had his other men covered,” Talia says. “You didn’t know about Carlo, but we didn’t mention him to you.”

“That’s what I said,” Lydia says irritably. “We didn’t have him covered. It won’t happen again.”

Talia’s eyes are still narrowed, but not because she’s uncertain of what she’s seeing. She presses her lips together, clearly displeased, and then shakes her head. Then she puts her hand up to her temple, grimacing. “I’m not up to this right now,” she mutters. “Look, we’ll talk. We need to talk. We have things we need to sort out before they get out of hand.”

“We’re around,” Lydia says, retreating out of the doorway.

She hears Talia say something, but the other woman stops itself before it’s a full comment and then doesn’t try again. So Lydia goes out of the room. She stops in the hall and checks the upstairs wards—Scott and Chris are still sleeping, though at least they’ve had the sense to go back to separate rooms—and then she goes downstairs. Peter’s sitting at the kitchen table, plowing through the remains of his cake, while Lydia can tell from the flicker of the downstairs wards that Stiles is working on something in the basement.

Lydia turns into the living room. She considers the man sleeping on the couch, and then reaches down to press at the point of his back that will tip him off onto the floor with the least effort. Then she steps back and lets Deaton work through his surprise and irritation; he has the sense to wipe all that away before he looks up at her.

“You want to be involved?” she says to him. “Then get up and be involved. We have a lot to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...so we're finally getting out of the Land of Denial! Also, again, do not freak out, there is a third installment and the first chapter will be up tomorrow (there was a point in time when I was capable of short-form, as in, I even wrote drabbles, and wow, that was so long ago).
> 
> Seriously. I know it was a loooong dance, but we are finally getting to the good stuff, trust me.
> 
>  **ETA:** So I lied and the first chapter of part three is now up. I won't have time tomorrow so just today, you are getting two parts.


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